Black History Has Always Been Contraband

The title of this review is an adjusted version of the book's title which is Our History Has Always Been Contraband.  Yours truly, the owner of this blog, is a white woman.  It is not my intention to otherize black people, but to tell it like it is.  

 I didn't learn black history in school.  There were no black people in the schools that I attended from kindergarten through high school, but black history is part of American history.  It should be treated as such.  People should be learning the history of blacks in classes about American history.  

I was given a copy of this book for review by someone unknown.  I can't find the e-mail among my saved messages.  It's a bit of a mystery to me.  

 I was glad to receive it.  I had read books dealing with black historical events, but I didn't think I knew as much about this subject as I should know.                               

                          

 

This book is a collection of essays and excerpts.  My review will include what I learned from this book that I considered most significant.

 In "On Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory and Other Felonious Ideas" by Robin D. G. Kelley, I found out about Freedom Libraries for the first time.  I was never taught about them in the library history class I took at library school.  So I looked up Freedom Libraries on Wikipedia.

Most Freedom Libraries were established in 1964 in response to the Civil Rights Movement.  African Americans had to sue for access to most Southern public libraries.  In Mississippi alone fifty Freedom Libraries were established.  There were also Freedom Libraries in Alabama, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. This implies to me that Pennsylvania had racially segregated libraries before the Civil Rights Movement. I did not know that any northeastern states had segregated libraries.   Freedom Libraries were staffed by volunteers.  They were vandalized or firebombed by local whites or Klan Members. 

An excerpt from The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution  by C. L. R. James taught me about racism among white Jacobins, the "radicals" of the French Revolution.  They didn't condemn slavery because property rights were so important to them.

I recorded a quote from the essay called  "The Case For Reparations" (2014) by Ta-Nehisi Coates which I underlined and starred. Here it is:

"Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net."

My comment on that quote was that any personal emergency becomes a financial disaster.  Now we have to think about an environmental disaster destroying a home that could be a black family's only wealth.

The British definition of  "liberalism" as opposed to the American definition of "liberalism" has come up for me in this discussion as it did in my review of We Organize To Change Everything here. If you read what I had to say about Neoliberalism in that review from nearly a year ago, you'll be up to speed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates  mentions The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander in his reparations essay in this collection, Our History Has Always Been Contraband.  I decided that I needed to find out whether Alexander's book appeared during Obama's Presidency. It did.  What an interesting confluence of references and eras! 

In "Introduction: Black Health Matters" from Black Disability Politics (2022) by Sami Schalk ,Schalk says that the mainstream disability movement is very white and racist.  This alienates Black disabled people.  

Schalk also points out that disability justice is intersectional. White supremacy and ableism are intertwined.  It occurs to me that people who are deeply prejudiced are prejudiced about everything.  For them, prejudice is a pervasive mindset.

"Crip theorist" Alison Kafer is brought to our attention by Schalk.  Kafer says that diabetes and asthma are more common conditions among minority populations.  Schalk  quotes Kafer as saying  that asthma occurs more often in heavily polluted neighborhoods where minorities live.  I would also like to cite an excellent article from the Diabetes Council on the prevalence of diabetes within minority communities which can be found here. 

On the other hand, I read another book a while ago that included the salient insight that pollution can't actually be confined to poor neighborhoods if they share borders with more prosperous ones.  Your nice neighborhood that is adjacent to the polluting factory in  the general vicinity will not totally escape the foul fumes. 

Finally, I will bring the essay "In The Spirit of the Midnight School" by Roderick A. Ferguson to your attention.  It centers on an enslaved woman named Lily Ann Granderson who founded a secret school for black slaves in Natchez, Mississippi.  It was called a "midnight school" because classes began at midnight and ended at 2 AM.  Granderson started with twelve students. She eventually graduated hundreds of  people knowing how to read and write.  They could then write their own passes and flee northward. And that's exactly what they did.

Now that I am finished reviewing Our History Has Always Been Contraband , I will give this collection the very good grade of B+.

 

                                       

An Unexpected Novella About Queen Elizabeth II

I had selected The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett for its brevity.  It's a novella that's only 120 pages in length. I hadn't expected to blog about it.  I imagined that there would only be enough content for a brief paragraph on Goodreads.   I now think I have enough comments for a few paragraphs.

                                 

The reader in question was the late monarch Queen Elizabeth II.  Let me emphasize that this did not happen.  It's a fictional tale.  Alan Bennett's Queen borrowed books from an imaginary traveling library that periodically came to Westminster which is the section of London where most of the British government is located.  

I looked up two authors that the Queen read.  There was Ivy Compton-Burnett whose novel she didn't care for, and Nancy Mitford whose work she decided to continue reading.  I decided that I wouldn't be reading either one of them.  The content that they deal with doesn't interest me.  I might have read Nancy Mitford when I was in my twenties, but not now.

Security confiscated a book she had been reading in a coach from which she was periodically waving at the public.  I would have been very irritated by the confiscation of my book.   The Queen requested another copy, but that would mean she'd need to re-read from the beginning.  That would be time wasted.  Since my reading is of great importance to me, I suppose that I'd consider this a significant drawback to being Queen if I were one. 

As someone who rarely likes the classics, I was pleased by the Queen deciding that Henry James "needed a good talking to".  I tried to read Henry James once, as I recall.  I think the James book that I attempted to read was Daisy Miller.  I don't believe that I got very far with it.  I was also pleased that the Queen disliked Jane Austen.  She thought that the characters were too similar. I don't want to deal with even one character like the ones in a Jane Austen novel.  I despise the entire Regency genre.

Elizabeth II got to read aloud from A Tale of Two Cities  for a Christmas broadcast.  This happens to be a favorite of mine which makes it a rare exception among the classics.  I hope she enjoyed the book as much as I did.

There was a surprise ending which I hadn't expected at all. I hadn't thought that this Queen would do anything surprising.  In fact, the actual Queen Elizabeth II probably never wanted to surprise.  The monarchy is supposed to be a predictable and dependable element of   English society.  At least, that's the way I see it.  English readers of this blog may have a different perspective on the monarchy.  I would give this book a grade of B-.

                                   

 

 

                                 

 

Whiteboard Warrior: Reading Congresswoman Katie Porter's Memoir

I not only swear that I read Katie Porter's memoir, but I can swear that I finished it in ten days.  Congresswoman Porter sent it to me as a gift given to those who donate to her campaign.  I have never voted for Katie Porter because I don't live in her district, but I have been an admirer of this member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  I first encountered her on the news making a whiteboard presentation to Congress.  That's why I decided to call this review "Whiteboard Warrior".  Katie Porter's office actually purchased a whiteboard on wheels for Congress.  I'm sure that the Congresswoman herself is getting good use out of that purchase.

                               

 

 Porter feared that if she didn't run, her district would be represented by a Republican as it had been in the past.  Yet it turned out that Democratic State Senator Dave Min who ran against Porter in the Democratic primary, had ideas similar to Katie Porter's. She has endorsed Min as the successor to her seat in the House of Representatives if she becomes a U.S. Senator.     

Congresswoman Porter tells us about how her first day in Congress went off schedule by many hours. In her experience, this happens frequently in Congress. Being able to schedule is crucial to an employed single parent.  If Katie Porter can't plan, she can't get child care.  

Porter went back to Iowa, her original home state, and remembered that she'd gone to Congress to create change.  So she had to keep trying to make Congress work for her.  It occurred to me that there might be other single mothers elected by their districts.  If Katie Porter found a way to be both single parent and legislator, others could follow her path.

Katie Porter actually collapsed on the floor of the House.  She asked a  colleague how he managed, and he told her she was working too hard.  All she really had to do in Congress was "show up and vote".  This meant following the agendas of others.  Porter wanted to be a change maker.

Dressing up as Batgirl for Halloween  may not be a radical change-making act, but it was certainly unusual for a Congresswoman.  There's an image of Katie Porter as Batgirl that I found from The U.K. Daily Mail which is a tabloid newspaper.  The link to this image is here. If you want to find out more about The U.K. Daily Mail, you can go to their article on Wikipedia here. 

Before Porter was a Congresswoman, she was a law school professor. Like other professors, she was expected to do research. She decided to research homeowners who had been foreclosed on because the terms of their mortgage had been changed without prior notification.  This meant that the lenders were cheating, but the debtors' lawyers never asked for documentation.  Porter found that  mortgage companies were guilty of violating the law more than half the time.  So she did valuable work before she was in Congress, and could do so again.

 Katie Porter has Iranian American constituents who have sung to her about the Zoroastrian festival of Nowruz which happens at the Spring Equinox.  It's considered Iranian New Year's Day.  They were trying to educate their Congresswoman about an important holy day in their religion.  I found information about Nowruz on Wikipedia here.

Porter tells us that there are fake PACs.  In this context, PAC stands for Political Action Committee.  Voters often receive fundraising e-mails from PACs saying that they're working for a variety of causes. It seems to me that it's a good idea to be wary of their claims--particularly if you've never heard of their organization.  

I was surprised that Porter had apparently never taken a statistics class.  Perhaps her law school thought that lawyers don't need to know the ins and outs of statistics.  Yet at one point, Porter was working with Elizabeth Warren who expected Porter to know that she couldn't ignore mothers in a survey  because she thought they were too busy.  This invalidated the data that Porter had collected.  I had to take a class on statistics in library school. Finding out what types of  patrons they have is how librarians know what their priorities should be. I didn't enjoy the statistics class, but I have since found out how useful it is to understand what makes statistics valid or invalid.

Porter revealed that members of Congress aren't allowed to have other jobs.  I didn't know that.  I thought that lawyers, for example, were still practicing law when Congress wasn't in session.  They can get stock dividends and other types of investment income.  Porter realized that her lack of wealth made her very different from many other members of Congress.

Katie Porter is currently one of three California members of the House of Representatives who are running for Dianne Feinstein's U.S. Senate seat. Senator Feinstein is retiring. I normally don't get this political on this blog, but the political content is relevant to the review.

I liked  I Swear Politics is Messier Than My Minivan very much.  I gave it a B+.