19th Century Women Struggle For Independence Through Music

The Choir by Carol M. Cram is a book that I obtained through Book Funnel.  I decided to read it because it deals with women who sing even though they aren't supposed to be able to do so.  I love to sing!  

 

                                               

 

 So this novel deals with British lower class women forming a choir in the 19th century.  They aren't expected to have the leisure to sing. The lower class are supposed to be continually struggling to survive.   The women in the choir must deal with marriage and family commitments plus long work hours that conflict with their performances.

This book also deals with a male character who is blackmailed for being gay.  Gay characters are an interest of mine, but the last time I reviewed a novel on this blog that deals with a gay character, it was Michelangelo in Michelangelo and the Stone Mistress back in 2022 here .  

I am sometimes sentimental. So I'll admit that when there was a positive resolution to a relationship in this novel that had turned romantic, there were tears is my eyes.  I hope that readers are also moved by the emotional intensity of  certain relationships within the pages of this novel.   

                                          

                                                  

 

The Goal is to Eliminate Racism

I'm not aware of being racist, but that doesn't mean that I'm not.  Anti-racism is a step beyond thinking that I'm not a racist.  It's taking a stand that you will actively oppose racism. The book that I'm reviewing is How To Be An Anti-Racist .

                                                     

 

How To Be An Anti-Racist is the first book I've read by Ibram X. Kendi.  I think I may want to read The Black Camps Movement which is one of his previous works.  I definitely want to read his most recent book, Chain of Ideas, which I've placed on hold at the library. 

Some may think that racism causes no harm, but it definitely does.  It destroys the possibility of positive interaction with persons of other races.  Racism prejudices you against such a possibility.

 The book opens with Kendi as a teen.   He'd given an MLK Competition speech saying that Black youth believed that it was OK to be feared, not to think and not to value education.  He also said "They think it's OK to confine their dreams to sports and music."  He'd adopted a sports career as his aspiration himself.  He realized that he'd been reproducing racist ideas in his speech, but he ended that he still "had a dream" which is a reference to MLK's famous speech.  After that, he had nightmares about his racist speech.  

At that point I included this significant quote from How To Be An Anti-Racist:

" Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime." 

One example of internalized racism was Kendi wearing hazel contact lenses.  He thought they made him look more White and that they looked better than his natural eye color which presumably looked more Black.  Why did he want to look more White? Why did he think it looked better? Kendi calls this Colorism which is a set of racist ideas about skin color.  So he was aware that this was racist, yet he continues to wear hazel contact lenses.  I consider this sad. 

Saying that you aren't racist means that you consider yourself neutral.  Kendi points out that  "there is no neutrality in the racism struggle".  You need to be fighting against the constructed hierarchy of the races in order to be anti-racist.  

It seems to me, that if racism is a fire that's burning down bridges between the races, you need to be anti-racist to fight the fire.

"Racist" isn't just an insult.  It describes the way someone categorizes other people.  You need to be able to identify racism in order to dismember the categorization process.

My father was part of the civil rights struggle as an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union.  I think he could be considered an anti-racist. 

"Our constitution is color blind," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan is his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson which legalized segregation in 1896.  Harlan also said that the White race would remain dominant "if it remains true to its great heritage."  This is a White supremacist statement, not a color blind one.  So Justice Harlan's statement should be considered unconstitutional.

"Racist" and "anti-racist" define thoughts and actions not "fixed identities", Kendi tells us.  Theoretically, we can be racist one minute and anti-racist the next.   Kendi no longer believes that a Black individual can't be racist.  He also no longer believes that the actions of a Black person reflect on him.  No one is a "race representative", but we need to focus on changing racist policies.  Unfortunately, I believe that so long as there are racist individuals, we can't prevent them from organizing to pass racist laws.  I don't consider that cynicism, I consider it realism.

Kendi says that the most threatening policy is race neutrality.  This is true for the same reason that a do nothing climate policy is the most threatening.  The non-white global south is the most victimized by climate change.  In the U.S.,  nearly 4000 areas that are mostly poor and non-white have higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan.  Flint is pretty toxic, so that makes these 4000 areas ultra-toxic.  So if we had prioritized cleaning up poor non-white areas, the people who lived there wouldn't be dying of lead poisoning.

Kendi says that he is one generation removed from picking cotton.  I would like to point out that some Whites are also one generation removed from agricultural serfdom.  My grandmother was a serf which meant she worked in the fields involuntarily for no pay for a Polish count. I think that such exploitation was widely practiced in a number of parts of the world. 

One Black police officer was reported as saying that Negroes are "too stupid" to get a good education, so they could get a good job.  I guess when police are abusive and don't enforce the law properly, then being a cop is a terrible job. 

Kendi complains that 80% of teachers are White.  I recall reading that few Blacks can afford to train to be teachers in addition to taking the classes to get a B.A. as a prerequisite.

When I read about the hundreds of thousands of Black women having been involuntarily sterilized, I wrote in my notes that this was an attempt at medical race genocide. Another sign of medical race genocide was the statistic that Black women are three to four times more likely to die while pregnant than White women.  

Kendi points out the differences between protests and demonstrations.  I've always used these terms interchangably, but Kendi says they have specific definitions.  "A protest organizes people for a long lasting campaign that has the goal of bringing about change.  A demonstration is a short term mobilization to bring attention to a problem.  In that case, my most recent political actions have all been protests, not demonstrations.

I hadn't been aware that racist policies pre-exist racist ideas.  The ideas are elaborated in order to justify the policies.  This observation by Kendi made complete sense when I thought about it.  The reverse only makes sense in the context of someone studying racism.   Out in the real world, racist politicians want to start by implementing racism through policy.  

Of course the goal of rational people who want to live in a civilized society without racial conflict is to end racism.  That is what I hope for, and it's what Kendi hopes for too.  This attitude needs to spread as widely as possible.

                                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                  

 

 

                                                      

 

Three or More is a Riot: An Essay Collection

 When I received a copy of Three or More is a Riot  by Jelani Cobb, it was an advance reader copy that was approved by Random House the publisher.  I needed to download it from NetGalley. This means it wasn't published yet.  I was reading a novel at the time. So I needed to finish that book.  Then it took me three weeks to read and mull over this essay anthology.  In that time period, a great deal has happened--including the publication of Three or More is a Riot.  So I'm late by the publisher's standards.  

                                                             

The title of this book is the definition of "riot" in the criminal code.  It's not a riot unless three or more people are involved in "concerted unlawful actions".  

Unlike many essay anthologies, this one is written by a single writer.  Jelani Cobb authored all 59 pieces included in the collection.  

Cobb discusses how mixed race Barack Obama was defined as black by both the black and white communities.  Yet he was brought up by his white mother to be culturally white.  I imagine that being culturally white allowed Obama to be elected President of the United States. 

Cobb cites a  2010 Pew poll whose results were that 55% of the total respondents viewed Obama as black while a third saw him as mixed race.  Cobb believes that the history of slavery, rape and random relationships means that there really aren't any genetically pure blacks.  I hadn't really thought of that. Cobb is right, of course.   

Cobb points out that the election of Obama couldn't change the "complex relations between African American men and law enforcement".  When I lived in a primarily African American neighborhood from the late 1980's to the early 21st century, what I saw wasn't "complex".  It was a poor relationship.  Police wanted to intervene during social events and celebrations.  

I am now doing research for this review on more recent black population shifts since The Great Migration in which many Southern blacks moved North.  Cobb mentioned that there is currently a high population of blacks in the South.  I learned online that there has been a Second Great Migration of young well educated Northern blacks to Atlanta.  I am very well aware of a black migration to California, but this new generation of blacks moving southward was unknown to me. 

My main source for this information is a website for The Brookings Institution.  The Brookings Institution is a think tank that does research on the social sciences.  It was formed in 1916 and is located in Washington D.C.  I had heard of The Brookings Institution, but had never previously used it as a source of research. 

 Cobb makes a reference to Lincoln having "preternatural political abilities".  I have never been a fan of Lincoln myself ever since I learned that he abolished slavery due to political pressure. You know, he had to deal with a civil war.  You'd think someone with "preternatural political abilities" could have ended it with a great deal less bloodshed.   Maybe he was more of a man of his time than a man for the ages.

 Author Cobb attended Howard University, one of the big four  HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities).  So he includes discussion of  HBCUs in this book.  Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison are among those mentioned as graduates of HBCUs.  This implies that without HBCUs, it might have been a good deal more difficult for these important black figures to become prominent.  I had almost no awareness of HBCUs before reading this book.  So I was thoroughly educated in the significance of these institutions by reading Three or More is a Riot.

Cobb mentions that white run universities were segregated for decades. The university where I got my B.A. had few black students while I attended it.   I did notice that and imagined that the reason was financial, and that there was little availability of scholarships and financial aid for those students.  I knew that this was discriminatory, but didn't think I could do anything to remedy the situation.

I decided to take African American History.  The students in that class were almost entirely black.  It was assumed that whites like me wouldn't be interested in African American History.  Yet I was. I didn't know any African Americans, but I was a history major who was attracted to all types of history.   

So here's some black history.  In 1867 the main campus of Howard University was built.  Howard was intended to be a  university for blacks.  Its founder, Oliver Howard was a white man who thought very highly of African American soldiers that fought in the Civil War.  Howard was a general in the Union Army and had been appointed a Commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau.  Howard and the other trustees of the future Howard University purchased 150 acres of farmland on which the university would be built.  Charles Boynton, who had been the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, was selected as Howard University's first president.  

The first black president of Howard wasn't appointed until 1926.  His name was Mordecai Wyatt Johnson.  He was so light skinned that he could be mistaken for white.  A photo of Johnson can be found in his Wikipedia article.

Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African American to make the Harvard Law Review, ran Howard University's law school.  Houston became future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall's mentor.  The two of them were responsible for the lawsuits that integrated U.S. schools in the 1950's. 

In 1934 there was a protest in which a line of Howard students wore nooses around their necks.  The students were demanding that Attorney General Homer S. Cummings stop the dozens of lynchings that were occurring across the U.S.  I didn't know that there were lynchings outside the former Confederate South.  I found a very disquieting article about lynchings in other parts of the country here.

In 1963 Albert Manley, the president of HBCU Spelman College, fired Howard Zinn, the head of Spelman's history department, for encouraging future author Alice Walker to participate in the civil rights movement. Albert Manley  was worried that Zinn's advice would upset white donors.  Possibly, but I'm upset that Zinn was fired for that reason.

In 1968 the students at HBCU Tuskegee University shut down the school and made a demand for more focus on African American studies.  They posted a sign on the front of the administration building which said BLACK UNIVERSITY.

Plessy v. Ferguson is a famous case, but I've never read anything about the facts involved.  Now I know from this book that it dealt with segregation in Louisiana railroad cars.  Homer Adolph Plessy was hoping that the case would bring about a "crusade for civil rights", but it had the opposite effect, says Cobb.  I wondered how that happened.  I looked it up online and decided that 1896 was just too early for the argument of equality between the races to succeed at such a high political level.  

Cases related to Plessy v. Ferguson were Buchanan v. Warley (1917) which outlawed housing discrimination covenants and Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) which restored housing discrimation covenants, Smith v. Allright (1944) which prohibited the Texas laws that disallowed black and Mexican voters from participating in primary elections, Sweatt v. Pamter (1950) which prohibited the exclusion of blacks from the University of Texas law school, and Brown v. the Board of Education which ended school segregation in 1954.  Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall headed the legal team that won Brown v. the Board of Education.  He had more than thirty years of dealing with cases involving racial segregation.

Author Jelani Cobb is the dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.  He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.  He is also the producer of the documentary The Riot Report.  He won the Peabody Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and is on the board of trustees of the New York Public Library.

I gave this book an A- because although this book is excellent and very thorough, I didn't read anything in it that was unexpected.