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
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 […]
What comes first: the movie or the book?
I have to admit that I have not yet seen the movie, although I heard about it before I knew there was a book. I was planning to see the movie when it came out on DVD and now it has, except now I worry about what the movie does to the book. It’s a dilemma. Hidden Figures is a good book, and a fairly easy read. For a book about mathematicians, it’s not too technical, but it has enough detail about the math and […]