Learning things: Books!

For several years now, I have wished that I had a list of all the books I've ever read - it would be so helpful for all my "I think I read a book about ___ but I can't remember what it was called" moments. I kept not starting it because it seemed so onerous, but Ben and I recently heard someone claim to have a mile of bookshelves in their home, which led to a vigorous discussion of whether or not it is possible to read a mile of books in one's lifetime, which led to me finally sitting down and documenting all my reading to try and prove it was possible. It turns out I have no idea how long a mile is, because after listing the 684 books I can remember reading in my life, I'm still only 1.2% of the way to a mile (although I'm 23% of the way to a ton, so maybe I'll aim for that instead).

Once I had the (fairly) complete list of all the books I've read in front of me, I got curious about the breakdown of the authors, since I've been trying to diversify the perspectives I am exposed to. Diversity in publishing is notoriously horrible, as awesome campaigns like We Need Diverse Books and 1000 Black Girl Books have helped bring to light, so I was prepared for it to be bad... but you guys, it was really bad. First, gender:

Time Period	Female Authors
Childhood	39%
High School	18%
College	56%
Post-College to present	37%
Last year only	59%
Overall	37%

To be fair, the percentage of books by female authors I read as a child would have been higher if I counted all 167 Baby-Sitters Club books separately, but that felt like cheating. It's mildly heartening to see that the majority of books I've read in the last year have been written by women, but I really did not expect that barely over a third of the books I've read in my entire life have been by women. And I'm pretty sure all the women have been cis - I don't think I've read a single book by a trans person, and that's a problem. (I also want to know what share of the authors I've read have been gay or bi, but I'm not sure how to figure that out - I suppose I could identify all the authors who are publicly out and assume the rest are straight? That feels weird but I haven't yet thought of a better way.)

Okay, now race. When I wasn't sure about an author's race I'd check their wikipedia page, which led me to notice that wikipedia identifies the race of people of color but not white people (i.e. authors of color are identified with labels like "Black" or "Mexican-American," but white authors either have no label or are just "American" or "British"). That wasn't particularly surprising, but is a nice little example of white being the assumed norm. Here's the race breakdown:

Time Period	Asian American	Black	Latin@	Middle Eastern	Native	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	97.0%
High  School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	80.0%
Post-College	1.6%	21.0%	2.1%	3.1%	0.5%	71.7%
Last year only	2.4%	27.5%	0%	0%	0%	70.0%
Overall	1.0%	9.5%	1.4%	3.0%	0.4%	84.8%

I was really surprised at how high the share of white authors was for my childhood - until I realized that a lot of the books featuring characters of color I remembered were actually written by white people (same goes for a surprising number of children's books with female protagonists being written by men) - for example, I remember the strong female Native protagonist from Island of the Blue Dolphins, but that book was actually written by a white man. And while I wouldn't say that authors should only be allowed to write about characters who share their gender and race, I would say that it's a problem when the only "Native voice" accessible isn't actually Native, especially when there are many Native children's authors who have a harder time getting published than their white counterparts.

The white male dominance of my high school reading wasn't surprising, given the white male dominance of the "classics" that comprise most assigned reading during that period. I do remember really not liking a lot of those books, though - so many white boys coming of age under various circumstances really got tedious after awhile. In retrospect I'm lucky that I developed a healthy love of reading outside of school, or that would probably have really turned me off of it.

While the share of authors of color I read has been steadily increasing, breaking it out like this makes me realize I need to pay attention beyond just looking for books by authors who aren't white. Specifically, I haven't read a book by a Latin@, Middle Eastern, or Native person in the last year, and the share of Asian American authors is not much better. And to be clear - my motivation here is not diversity for diversity's sake, it's that I know I am missing some fantastic writing by only reading authors from one narrow band of the human experience. For example - last year a friend turned me on to Octavia Butler, whose work I quickly became obsessed with because it is a type of sci-fi I didn't even know could exist. It's riveting and beautiful and though-provoking in ways that were entirely new for me, and I don't have any doubt that it's informed by her experience as a Black woman and couldn't have been produced by someone without that perspective.

I'm not going to swear off reading white and/or male authors forever, or even for a specific time period, but I am going to be much more intentional about only reading books by those authors when there is a specific reason to. I've got a few lists of great authors of color and female authors I'm going to work my way through (seriously, just google "best Asian authors" or "scifi books by women" or whatever you want - the internet will provide), and I can't wait. I know approaching my reading in this way will broaden my horizons and help push me past the limits of my own experiences, but even more importantly, I know it will lead me to some fantastic books that I otherwise would have missed out on.

Thinking about things: Comfort over truth

I am adding a new category to my posts about social justice - in addition to sharing about the things I am learning and doing, I want to occasionally share things I am thinking about and struggling with. I want to share more instances where I fall short of where I need and want to be, because just sharing the things (I think/hope) I am doing right is dishonest. It also perpetuates the idea that you either "get it" or you don't, instead of the reality that we must all constantly push ourselves to get better, knowing that there is no point at which you have "arrived" and can stop pushing.

***

A few weeks ago, I was spending some time reading up on President Obama's remarks at the national prayer breakfast and the ensuing backlash and I stumbled across an article on Christian motivations for lynchings in the Jim Crow South. I expected to learn a few things from the article, but I did not expect this:

What shook me wasn't the image itself, since (unfortunately) it's so familiar. What shook me was the caption: this picture was taken in my hometown, six years before I was born.

My first series of thoughts were horror and revulsion that I probably know some of the people in that picture. They could be my teachers, my neighbors, my friends' parents. They could be people I've passed on the street or in the grocery store, and exchanged smiles and pleasantries with. I know racism is ever present, but it's one thing to know institutional racism exists, and it's another thing to be confronted with people you actually know harboring such deep-seated racial hatred.

Next I became very self-righteous. I wanted to know who these people were and confront them! I wanted to print out the picture and take it home and show it to everyone I encountered, and demand if they knew who those people were! I wanted to weed them out of my life if they were in it, and - regardless of whether I personally knew them - I wanted to confront them, and publicize who they were, and make them atone for their sins!

While I was letting myself race down that mental path, and feeling bathed in the comfort of my own righteous indignation, another thought popped into my brain. Not from the conscious place where I have self-aware inner dialogue, but from the unconscious place where things I don't want to think about sometimes manage to break the surface. And that thought was: I don't want to know who these people are.

I don't want to find out my beloved teacher, or my friendly neighbor, or my childhood friend's parent, is under one of those robes. I don't want to find out that someone I have trusted and loved, someone who was kind to me and mattered to me, is also this other, horrible thing. It would be so much easier for me to just never have to find that out, and to keep believing that there are "good white people" and "bad white people" and myself and my own are all firmly in the "good" camp. And then my horror and revulsion turned inward, and I felt deep shame for even entertaining those thoughts. It would be easier for me to not know? Easier?? Since when was this work supposed to be easy? Since when was my own comfort worth not challenging the outright oppression and murder of my fellow human beings? Since when am I so quick to back away as soon as this work requires the slightest amount of risk to myself?

I tend not to wallow in guilt, and to get frustrated when other people get stuck there, because guilt doesn't accomplish anything. It feels almost self-indulgent to spend time mired in white guilt instead of actually doing something about it. But I want to actually sit in these feelings of shame and revulsion for a while, because right now sitting here is actually doing something - it is teaching me, painfully and not for the first time, that white supremacy affects all of us. It hurts all of us. Knowing that I am ready to consider, even fleetingly, prioritizing my own comfort over my sense of justice - that says something about what is in my heart as a result of growing up and living in a society that tells me, every way and every day, that my comfort IS worth more than the suffering of people of color. In fact, one of the tenets of white supremacy culture is the belief that those in the dominant group have a right to emotional comfort, at the expense of the truth for those in the oppressed group. The shard of that belief is lodged deep inside of me, no matter how much I don't want it to be there. That is what racism does to white people - as James Baldwin said, "one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." This picture is of my hometown - it's a part of me and I'm a part of it. My desire to not confront that uncomfortable truth is forcing me to instead confront the diminishing of my own humanity - it feels awful, but at the same time I am thankful because feeling how racism directly damages me makes me feel that much more urgency to dismantle it, starting with myself.

Learning things: Other voices

While I continue to work my way through my history reading, I wanted to take a post to talk about all the reading I do that isn't as formal as books. Just like the dominant group gets to define history, the dominant group also gets to define current reality - or at least the most widely-known version of it. I think about the congressional hearing on birth control with all men and the race panel with all white people - the assumption is that dominant group members are so all-knowing that they understand the experience of the oppressed group just as well as the actual oppressed people do. I also think about much of the media I consume - even when it's not so explicit as an all-white race panel, there is no shortage of white, straight, cis, and/or male voices in the news that I have the easiest access to, or in the social circles where I discuss that news. Happily, there's the internet!

Specifically, over the past few years I've started being intentional about following blogs written by people in communities whose perspective I rarely get to hear. Hearing from a variety of diverse voices helps me gain more perspective on the world, and how many people experience it so differently than I do - which in turn leads to deeper and more holistic understanding on my part. It's sort of like a live version of "People's History of the US." I also appreciate that reading these blogs allows me to gain that valuable perspective without having to burden all the people of color in my life with the task of educating me - although I also try to keep in mind that the bloggers themselves are doing me a service pro bono, and so I also donate to them to fund their work.

What I'm reading so far:

• Black Girl Dangerous: BGD is a blog written by many different queer and trans* people of color. I love that it has so many different voices on it - everything from nuanced intellectual analysis of pop culture to personal stories of joy, pain, and everything in between. Mia McKenzie, BGD's founder, also recently published a book that is great - I bought myself a copy and my sister bought me one too, so now I have twice the greatness if anyone wants to borrow one!
• Great post to get started: Sooooooooo many! I especially like her posts about ally-ship and how not to suck at it - 8 Ways To Not Be An "Ally" and No More "Allies" both pushed me a lot in how I think about myself as a white person aspiring to act in solidarity with communities of color. I also love a new series they are doing called "Qraftish," which features a young Black queer woman who shares her thoughts on identity while making crafts.
• Racialicious:  Also written by multiple contributors, Racialicious is a blog about race and pop culture. I particularly like that a lot of the pop culture they write about is nerd culture - they cover Comic-Con every year, and often live-tweet various panels and media events. Plus, a lot of their contributors are really funny.
• Great post to get started: The worst reactions to John Boyega's appearance in the Star Wars Teaser is brilliant, and I also really appreciated their coverage of racism and Serial.
•  Angry Asian Man: The title is pretty self-explanatory. AAM is written by Phil Yu, but he brings in a ton of other blogs, magazines, youtube streams, etc... to cover a variety of Asian American perspectives on news and pop culture. He tends to write many brief updates instead of fewer, longer posts - which makes AAM very accessible and enjoyable, because if you aren't into one topic you can bet there will be another one posted later that same day.
• Great post to get started: The about page is actually a pretty great post in and of itself.
• Native Appropriations:Written by Dr. Adrienne Keene, who is a postdoc studying Native higher education and is a member of the Cherokee Nation. She write about the representation, and lack thereof, of Native people in the media, as well as how Native culture is often appropriated and represented in problematic ways. She's smart and snarky and just wonderful.
•  Great post to get started: White tears and aggressive Indians, a paragraph-by-paragraph deconstruction of some of the problematic coverage of what happened when the Daily Show brought Native American activists to confront fans of the Washington football team who defend its name.

What I'm committing to start reading:

• In compiling the above list, I realized I don't read any Latin@-focused blogs (although Racialicious and BGD both have Latin@ contributors). I found a list of Latina feminist bloggers, so I'm going to check out the various recommended blogs for a while and pick out one (or more) to follow permanently.
• Similarly, I realized that all the people I read currently are able-bodied, so I'm also going to explore this list of Top 10 Disability Blogs to find some new people to follow.
• Anyone else have suggestions? Let me know!

Learning Things: History

As I talked about in my last entry, I am re-committing myself to doing more and being better about using my privilege and power to work for equity. I've been working on myself in this area for a while now, but am going to start documenting my efforts here to try and hold myself accountable to doing this work more, not just when it's convenient. I'd also love to get ideas from others, if anything I write here is something you have thoughts on! I'm tentatively thinking I'll divide my efforts into the highly nuanced categories of "learning things" and "doing things," to try and make sure I am not doing entirely one or the other. I am going to always include what I've been doing so far (even if it's nothing), and what I'm committing to do next.

So, today's theme is learning things - history edition! One of the benefits of being in the dominant group is that you get to write your own history - that's how I went through school learning things like "the Indians helped the pilgrims and they all feasted together!" and "slaves were really treated like part of the family!" and "the Civil War was about state's rights!"  From my (non-American) parents I was often taught the second half of those sentences at home - "... and then the pilgrims committed systematic genocide against the Indians!" and "...only if you consider people in your family to be your property that you can beat, rape and murder!" and "....specifically, the right of states to base their entire economy on slavery!" So, I'm not coming into this with the view that everything I learned about history is the One Righteous Truth, but I do know that my knowledge of history is often lacking and one-sided. Since one of the ways that oppression works is erasing the history and culture of the oppressed, I am aiming to re-educate myself about American history (and maybe eventually world history, but I'm trying to not be overly ambitious at first) in an effort to resist that erasure.

What I have done so far: I have been somewhat sporadically learning about history as I find interesting articles and books, but I haven't been particularly purposeful about it.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations is excellent, and brilliantly lays out how America as it currently exists could and would not exist without being built on the plundered lives and labor of Black people. I got to see him speak at Penn a few months ago, and he is equally brilliant in person - the video is online if anyone is interested.
• Because Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best, I made a twitter account so I could follow him, and he recommended A Sword Among Lions: Ida B Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.Oh. My. God. I don't think I even learned about Ida B Wells in school, but she is AMAZING! I think I annoyed the crap out of Ben and everyone I work with while I was reading this biography, because I just couldn't shut up about her. Anecdote: She was riding in the "ladies car" of the train, and the conductor told her she had to leave because she wasn't White and therefore not a lady, but she resisted his efforts to remove her and even BIT HIM before he physically forced her out. Then she sued the train company for discrimination and won - in 1884. Unfortunately, the company appealed and the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the ruling in 1887. And that was one small blip early on in her lifetime of fighting for the rights of women and Black people.
• At the recommendation of a friend, I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. I think the great migration was mentioned once in passing in my AP US History class, but I really had no idea about the magnitude of both the migration itself and its impact on the country. The whole thing is beautifully written - it's nonfiction but reads like literature. One of the parts that made a big impression on me was the utter bafflement of many White Southerners about why all the Black people were leaving - there are many letters, editorials, journal entries, etc... from the time that illustrate their complete inability to comprehend why Black people wouldn't want to stay in the land of sharecropping and lynching, because they genuinely believed that conditions were as good as they could be for Black people. I had previously thought that White people not understanding the reality that Black people live in was a recent phenomenon, but this book disabused me of that notion.
• I can't actually remember where I saw this book recommended, I think it might have been the Daily Show, but I also read and enjoyed Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barrack Obama. My previous understanding of the civil rights movement was very superficial (MLK was Professor X, Malcolm X was Magneto, a few new laws were passed, the end). This book complicates that linear narrative, and taught me a lot about how the different leaders interacted with and influenced each other throughout their lives.

What I'm committing to do next: I want to be a bit more systematic about filling in the holes in my history education, instead of (or at least, in addition to) my previous haphazard approach.

• I'm going to start with A People's History of the United States, because I keep seeing it suggested as the starting point for learning American history from the point of view of the colonized, not the colonizers. I figure that will give me some high level understanding, and then I can use the bibliography to pick what to read next.
• I'm also going to read Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year. I saw it on the Daily Show and it looked really interesting, and I know I need to
  unlearn the sanitized "MLK just wanted everyone to get along" version I was taught in school, and learn instead about the radical who railed against the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism.
• Lastly (for now), I signed up with some work friends for a free online class on the history of American education reform. I think we often have a tendency to think that the work we do "really" started when we got here, so I want to better understand the history leading up to the education system as it currently exists, and the history of efforts to reform it, so I can better and more accurately situate my work in that context.