The unsung heroes of a story are just as important (or more so sometimes) then the ones that get their names in the history books. And Georgia Gilmore did a very important thing: she put food into the tummies of people. An army cannot go far on an empty stomach and when the people of Montgomery, Alabama were walking to work and places instead of taking the bus, she helped by selling her pies. She helped make lunches. She gave her home for secret meetings […]
Protest yourself into a good read
This is more of a 4.5 than a 4. I like it. The art is really “nifty” and cool. The story has been done before. However, it is done slightly different than usual as well. I am not sure it is really meant for kids (or if it is, at least 5 and up). It really is a more adult take on the subject. The book itself is basic: With very simple text it talks about how instead of doing some of the violent […]
A Bit Late to the Party on This One, But Still Relevant
I have had this book on my iPad forever! Seriously, I think I downloaded it before 13th, the Netflix documentary, was even a development idea. I watched 13th last year, and yet it didn’t spur me to pick this up, but after reading The Hate U Give, this felt like a fitting follow up. I remember being very impressed by 13th, but the nice thing about reading this, is that it really gave me the chance to absorb and contemplate everything, rather than being hit […]
Necessary Trouble
I try to give myself a healthy reading diet, and part of that diet is books from the point of view of people who do not experience the world the same way my privilege as a cis white woman allows. When I picked up March: Book One it felt in many ways a basic history, an introduction to world that I was already relatively familiar with, even though it was not my own. If Book One is a primer then Book Two is a call […]
An unintended theme
I trust that these two figures, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, require no introduction. Without qualification, they are two of the most important American figures of the 20th century. Contemporaries, they often took up oppositional positions, though they were fighting for the same cause: the right of black Americans to claim the equality they were rightfully owed. Both men gave their lives to the struggle, and have gone on to represent a great many things to a great number of people. Death of […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]