I’m crying my heart out! Trumpsters please stay clear

Thank you for this article - I think this quote is a perfect reflection of what I've seen time and time again as people break their arm patting themselves on the back for reading this book:

It’s an excellent read.

Given what the Trumpsters have been saying over on their Li'l White Power thread, I would not assume this at all. 

We are intolerant of racism, discrimination, and so on. Basically everything that Trump is. Obviously those who support him support that.

Heh. Would that my posts were as pithy as that sign.

Layla Saad Me and White Supremacy


Ibram Kendi is a man but I’m struggling to think of the names of women right now


Ummm Dr. Blay known as Feminista Jones on Instagram...very much a black space but informative. I feel like she wrote a book

A Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys by Eddie Moore Jr. for teacher peas

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo(sp)

Between The World & Me Ta-Nehisi Coates


Bookmarked to read but haven’t it sounds relevant to this post I will share now so as not to bump an old albeit relevant thread with the link later:

www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/white-antiracist-allyship-book-clubs/2020/06/11/9edcc766-abf5-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html?outputType=amp







Easiest way to stay up to date on anti racist reading list would be to add Mahogany Books to your Insta feed. It’s a book store in DC.

Thanks, Olan and SassyAngel.

I personally, didn’t find that an easy book to read, at all. It was tough, as it should be. I actually felt a bit worse about myself after it, because it bought to my attention things I hadn’t even thought about and reinforced my privilege, when I’d prided myself previously on being 100% aware of it. I wasn’t.

I have read it, and my comment is not a reflection the quality of the book, it's a reflection too many women who seem to think that reading the book is a huge accomplishment and whenever the subject of race comes up they refer to it. 

Mothers of Mass Resistance
By Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

It addresses white women’s dominant role in the rise of white supremacy, segregation and the beginnings of conservatism 1920-1970.

Amazon’s summary:
“Why do white supremacist politics in America remain so powerful? Elizabeth Gillespie McRae argues that the answer lies with white women.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Without these mundane, everyday acts, white supremacist politics could not have shaped local, regional, and national politics the way it did or lasted as long as it has.

With white women at the center of the story, the rise of postwar conservatism looks very different than the male-dominated narratives of the resistance to Civil Rights. Women like Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker publicized threats to their Jim Crow world through political organizing, private correspondence, and journalism. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown decision and persisted past the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti-busing protests. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right. Mothers of Massive Resistance reveals the diverse ways white women sustained white supremacist politics and thought well beyond the federal legislation that overturned legal segregation.”

*******

Democracy in Chains
By Nancy McLean

It’s history based. Reading it was scary—what is written appears to be happening in real time.

From Amazon’s summary:
“Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.”

********

Stamped From the Beginning
By Ibram X. KEndi

Amazon’s summary:

“The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.

Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities.

In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.”

********

The Color of Law
By Richard Rothstein

Amazon’s summary:

“Widely heralded as a “masterful” ( Washington Post) and “essential” ( Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history ( Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.”

I’m just starting this book now.

Uh....ok. Why is any different than mentioning any book that you think would be helpful to read? Or naming a source? Isn’t the goal to help people have insight into their own prejudice, history, and systemic racism? Why would it be a bad thing to mention a book that can help achieve that?

It’s ironic (or hypocritical?) that your post did exactly what you claim I was doing by referencing the book.

No problem! Thanks for your willingness to read them!