The Sum of Us: Racism Benefits No One

Author Heather McGhee wants us to know that racist policies don't benefit anyone.  That's why she wrote The Sum of Us.  I downloaded it from Net Galley.  I didn't have a chance to start this review until now.  I was way too absorbed by what was happening in politics.  Now let's get back to book reviewing which is what I do on this blog.

                                    

                                

 

This book covers a variety of topics and provides historical perspective on each one.  I considered it thorough and insightful.

McGhee argues that when  racist whites are opposed to public services, it's not because they want smaller government.  It's because of their racism.  They don't want blacks to benefit.

When President Truman proposed government health insurance, 90% of the senior beneficiaries would have been white, but McGhee claims that the idea that any blacks would get health insurance was considered unacceptable.  This caused the introduction of union health benefits which hadn't existed previously. Eventually Medicare came into being twenty years later.

I was fascinated with the history of labor unions included in this book.  The Knights of Labor, founded in 1886 included whites, blacks and women, but in the 1890's  the American Federation of Labor unions didn't allow blacks to join. 

There was also another disturbing development in the 1890's. The National Guard were called out to break strikes. McGhee says that employers were calling the National Guard, but as I suspected it was really governors.  Employers don't have the authority to do that.  They needed the support of their state's governor.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations ,which began in 1935, re-integrated their unions which allowed unions to become more powerful.  When blacks, immigrants or women are excluded from unions, employers can hire these excluded categories of workers as scabs.  Scabs disrupt strikes.  Unions were at their peak during the 1950's.  After the 1950's unions have continuously declined.  This wasn't because of unions excluding people.  It was because employers began to ignore the laws that protected workers.  They illegally fired workers who tried to organize unions, and even shut down entire factories rather than deal with unions that were already in existence.  

There were numerous other developments involving labor organizing that I knew very little about--such as the Fight for $15 which has been racially inclusive.  

I consider voter registration a standard part of the voting process, but Heather McGhee says it began as a voter suppression tactic intended to prevent blacks from voting.   Registration is most difficult for people who move often.  McGhee says this includes the poor who are inaccurately thought to be largely non-white.  Presumably, she's talking about involuntary moves.  As a poor person myself, I've noticed that moving is expensive and I try to move as little as possible.   

McGhee points out that whites say in surveys that they prefer to live in racially integrated neighborhoods, but the overwhelming majority of whites don't.  As a case in point, I grew up in a white suburban neighborhood that my civil rights activist father chose to live in.  As an adult, I've mainly lived in integrated neighborhoods, and no they are not  "bad" neighborhoods.

McGhee also points out that in many localities polluting enterprises were deliberately situated in black neighborhoods, but the white neighborhoods nearby are also polluted.  Pollution doesn't stop at the border of the black neighborhoods.

McGhee concludes that the strength of the United States is in its diversity.  If we capitalize on it, we can become the nation we were meant to be.  For me, this is self-evident. 

                         

                                          

    

The Failures of White Feminism As Observed by Koa Beck

 I admit that as a white woman myself, I didn't wonder why I never encountered non-white women at the feminist meetings that I attended in the early 1980's.  That's when I broke away from my family and started acting independently.  I wasn't comfortable with all the feminist organizations that I found.  In some cases, I would attend one meeting and never come back.  But yes, all the women were white.  I've just finished White Feminism by Koa Beck, and she told me that this was no accident.

                               

Beck reveals in her book that she is a light skinned person of color who has passed for white.  She charges white feminists with being self-centered in their approach to feminism.  They also don't challenge societal institutions, but treat them as a given.  Their priority is achieving success in the political and economic context that men have established.  Once they have realized this goal, they can sit back, and say "I've got mine."  They benefit from the pervasive racism and classism, and don't question them.  Since they are totally immersed in their myopic perspective,  it doesn't even occur to them that women of color have other needs and priorities.

After discussing the problem that women of color have with obtaining child care, Beck launches into an attempt made by a woman named Priya  to work with white women on the issue of child care.   She proposed cooperative daycare without realizing that this wasn't an issue for these upper middle class white women.  They all had nannies.  They made a presentation to management, but it didn't include Priya's  appeal for childcare.  The white women ended up getting what they wanted which was extended maternal leave after giving birth.  I couldn't believe that they didn't even try to go to bat for what Priya needed.  They didn't care about the issue, so as far as they were concerned it didn't matter.  The colossal arrogance of these women was astounding.  

I do have to say that Beck didn't present the complete picture when she portrays the Pankhursts who fought for women's suffrage in England.  She mentions Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel who confirm Beck's view of white feminists with their upper class snobbery.  Yet Emmeline Pankhurst had another daughter named Sylvia who focused on working class women.  Sylvia Pankhurst was actually a socialist.  See my review of a biography of Sylvia Pankhurst.  There have been exceptions among white feminists. 

 It is often said that exceptions prove the rule.  So even though there may be a contemporary white feminist equivalent of Sylvia Pankhurst who is eager to be a genuine ally with lower class women and women of color, the majority of white feminists probably are as Beck depicts them.  White Feminism is a tongue lashing that its targets richly deserve.

                           

 

 

 

 

The Organ Thieves: A Heart Transplant Without Consent From The Black Family Involved

So let me tell you about what happened to an African American family of Richmond, Virginia in 1968. William Tucker's brother Bruce went missing.  He learned that Bruce had been located at the Medical College of Virginia.  He had to actually go there to be told that he was dead, and would need to make funeral arrangements.  This had been difficult for William Tucker because polio had left him unable to walk without crutches.  He didn't find out that Bruce's heart and kidneys were gone until the mortician at the funeral home told him.  How did this happen without the family being informed?  That's the story told in The Organ Thieves by Chip Jones.  It's a non-fiction book about real events.  I found it very powerful.  It's my first five star read of 2021.

                                    

                                                                      

The Organ Thieves gives historical background involving medical schools paying grave robbers to obtain bodies in order to teach students anatomy.    In the Medical College of Virginia during the 19th century no one cared if  they used the bodies of slaves and free Blacks for this purpose.   The Medical College of Virginia even stated in their publicity material that no  White man was ever dissected there.  The deliberate choice of using Black bodies in medical schools also happened in the North. Chip Jones pointed out that medical schools in New York were using the corpses of African Americans as far back as 1787. We know this because of the riot protesting the practice during that year in New York.  Jones said that this may have been the earliest Black Lives Matter protest in the United States. I would add that Black deaths also matter as well as respect for Black burial sites.  By 1884 body snatching by medical schools was illegal.  They were supposed to get permission from families.

 So in 1968, the Medical College of Virginia had committed a crime when they took Bruce Tucker's heart for a heart transplant without getting family permission.   Jones' narrative of events shows how this happened. He quotes from Son of Virginia, the memoir of the Tucker family's lawyer, Doug Wilder.   Wilder claimed that the hospital considered Bruce Tucker a derelict.   Wilder believed that this was an assumption based on racism.  

I thought that The Organ Thieves was very thorough in exposing the roots of medical racism by showing us the history of the theft of Black bodies for medical purposes throughout the history of the United States.  Readers of this book should be outraged, as I was.

 

                                 

   

                                

Next To Last Stand: A Longmire Mystery As My First Read of 2021

 I haven't really kept up with Craig Johnson's Longmire series.  One of the reasons is probably because it had spawned a Netflix series.  For me, this is a sign that the series has gotten too popular.  The last Longmire novel that I reviewed on Goodreads was in 2014, but I really wanted to read more mysteries this year.  So there was Next To Last Stand gazing at me from the top of a library book pile, and I said "Why not that one?"  

                                    

 

What drew me to this volume in the Longmire series is the art aspect  which hinges on a famous painting that has been reproduced by the thousands, and hangs in a great many bars throughout the United States.  It's called  Custer's Last Fight by Cassily Adams.  I found a death notice for Cassily Adams from The Indianapolis Star on May 9, 1921 which appears on the internet here. That article explains why there were so many copies of this painting sent to establishments that exist for the enjoyment of alcoholic beverages.  You can also read more about this painting in Next To Last Stand. 

The narrative of Next To Last Stand begins with the death of Charley Lee Stillwater, a resident of the Veterans' Home of Wyoming.  He had left paintings and an extraordinary amount of cash in a shoe box. 

Stillwater's heir turned out to be named after Bass Reeves, the first black deputy U.S. marshal in the West.  I have to admit that I was more fascinated by that piece of African American history than what happened to Custer's Last Fight.  It saddens me that The Black Badge, a biography of Bass Reeves by his nephew,  Judge Paul L. Brady, isn't more widely available.  See "The Remarkable Bass Reeves" by Karl Smallwood here.  This thorough article  cites The Black Badge as a source.

                            

                                               Bass Reeves (Public Domain Photo)

                                        
                

Readers who are interested in Custer memorabilia will be delighted by Next To Last Stand.  I enjoyed it.  I'm glad that I made a return visit to the saga of Longmire's ongoing adventures.

                                     

                                

 

 

 

My 2020 Retrospective

                                  Image courtesy of Maicyber at freedigitalphotos.net

 

 This year I decided to count the number of reads that I gave five stars to include in this annual post.  I had eighteen of them.  Since this is a new statistic, I don't know how this compares to previous years.

Shomeret: Masked Reviewer had around 12,000 views in 2020.  That's about 3000 more than last year.   So this little blog that could is continuing to expand its audience a bit every year.

My most viewed post was, as usual, on Flying High Reviews. It was a review of a YA lesbian historical novel called Silhouette of a Sparrow which can be found here. Why was there so much interest? My guess is that there aren't enough lesbian historical novels written for the YA audience. 

 The most viewed post on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer during 2020 was my review of a novel about the creation of Michelangelo's David called The Giant which can be found here.  I think that Michelangelo's David is a popular subject.  I also think that the author of this book, Laura Morelli, has a following that increased the number of readers for this particular review. 

The rest of this post will be the list of my best reads of the year in various categories.   If I don't mention a blog review, it's because I didn't review the book on my blog.  In most cases, I did review it on Goodreads. I like to call this section of my annual retrospective:

                      THE GOLDEN MASK AWARDS

 Best Read of the Year

 Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

It's also the best non-fiction book. It deals with the lack of inclusion of women in research, and the design of things that women use.  I thought that I would never have the time to read this extremely dense and topical book. Thanks to Read Women's discussion of Invisible Women on Goodreads, I did.

Best Book Published in 2020

Rachel Maddow: A Biography by Lisa Rogak

This is also the best in the bio/memoir category that I read in 2020. Since I knew nothing about Rachel Maddow's life, I found this book surprising.  It also humanized her for me.

Best Fiction

 The Time Collector by Gwendolyn Womack

This is also the best romance that I read in 2020.  It deals with characters who are psychometrists.  This means that they can read the history of objects by touching them.  I reviewed this fascinating novel here  on this blog.

Best Young Adult Novel

A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow

It's also the best fantasy I read in 2020. What if all sirens were Black, and some were involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's?  This YA alternate history fantasy swirls urgent issues with paranormal species and African American teen life.  I learned so much from reading it.  See my review on this blog here.

Best Historical Fiction

The Talking Drum  by Lisa Braxton

It's also the best indie novel that I read in 2020.  This is a novel about urban redevelopment.  I initially thought that urban redevelopment is too recent a phenomenon to be considered historical.  I did research on the subject and discovered that it didn't begin that recently.  See my review on this blog here.

Best Science Fiction

A Song For A New Day by Sarah Pinsker 

It's the music aspect that caused me to read this book, not the pandemic and certainly not the dystopia.  Though I have to say that this ends up being such a hopeful dystopian novel.

Best Contemporary Fiction

Side Chick Nation by Aya de León

"Side chick" becomes a metaphor for Puerto Rico's relationship to the U.S.  in #4 of de Leon's Justice Hustlers series involving female vigilantes. It's also the first novel taking place during Hurricane Maria and its aftermath.

Best Mystery

Songs From The Deep by Kelly Powell

If you've been scrolling down the page, you'll probably notice the titles with "song" in them. It's true that I'm very musically inclined. Yet in the case of this YA mystery, the "songs" are there because this is another book in which sirens play a role.  The sirens have been falsely accused of murder.  This made the mystery unusual enough to attract my attention.

Best Thriller

Cheater's Game by Paul Levine

This is the latest in the series about lawyer Jake Lassiter.  His nephew has unwisely involved himself in a college admissions scandal.   At the time this was written, it was ripped from the headlines.  Here's my review on this blog.

Best Net Galley

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

This is an authentic own voices novel dealing with a trans male protagonist and his search for identity.  It also deals with a Syrian American community.  My review on this blog is here.

Two thirds of the authors of these books are new to me.  The four exceptions are Laura Morelli, Bethany C. Morrow, Aya de León and Paul Levine.

                              

 

 

 

 

 

Bell Hammers: The Life of a Stubborn Independent Coot

Bell Hammers by Lancelot Schaubert is a biography of  Wilson Remus, a fictional character who is referred to as Remmie throughout the narrative. 

                                  

                                   

 Bell Hammers starts when Remmy was six years old with an incident that is very revealing of his character.  That chapter prepares us for further extraordinary departures from expected behavior.

I liked Remmy very much when he was behaving unconventionally or being inventive, but I loved him when he was downright subversive organizing other people to resist a company that was destroying the quality of their lives.  I loved his aspiration to be a Robin Hood.  He's quoted as saying "Always gonna be rich guys who need robbing because they stole in the first place from the poor."  A government concerned with justice would act to right these wrongs.  In the absence of such a government,  I admire people like Remmy who seek to rectify them through individual action.

Remmy evidently didn't consider himself a radical.  This was shown in his response to an FBI report that condemned the movie It's A Wonderful Life because it showed rich people in a negative light. (Yes, an FBI  agent who saw the movie when it was first released did indeed say that.  I found an insightful article on the subject that appeared in the UK newspaper, The Independent here.) Remmy believed that he wasn't a communist for thinking negative thoughts about the rich.  He just wanted to read more Robin Hood comics. 

It seems to me that the legend of Robin Hood of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, is about the redistribution of wealth which is fundamental to a socialist society.

Over the course of his fictional career Wilson Remus (Remmy) eventually became a significant figure who rabble roused on behalf of his community even if he ended up in prison.  The American public needs courageous and independent rebels.  They are the ones who stand up for this country's ideals.  I considered Remmy an inspiration.

                                     

 

THE ROAD TO WOOP WOOP BLOG TOUR AND REVIEW #TheRoadtoWoopWoop&BlogTour @meerkatpress @eugenbacon

 

The last time I reviewed a book published by Meerkat Press, it was Beast Heart back in March here.  That review was ambivalent.  So I was surprised to receive an invitation from Meerkat to participate in the blog tour for The Road to Woop Woop, a single author short story anthology by Eugen Bacon.  I've never read Eugen Bacon, and short story anthologies have been widely characterized as being like a box of chocolates.  So I could only expect to be surprised.  Accepting a blog tour invitation for such a book is a risk for all concerned.  Would it be a good surprise? 

PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY

Eugen Bacon’s work is cheeky with a fierce intelligence, in prose that’s resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her novel Claiming T-Mo ‘a confounding mysterious tour de force’. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon’s own. This peculiar hybrid of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders of normalcy will hypnotise and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be labelled. The stories in this collection are dirges that cross genres in astounding ways. Over 20 provocative tales, with seven original to this collection, by an award-winning African Australian author. 

                             

 

RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 1, 2020

GENRES:  COLLECTION/SPECULATIVE FICTION/DARK FANTASY 
 

MEERKAT PRESS BOOK PAGE

https://www.meerkatpress.com/books/the-road  

MY REVIEW

Flare, the protagonist of "Touched" was repeatedly told "You are the favorite."  This story was my favorite because she used her divine gift responsibly.  Flare only flared to maximum when she felt under serious threat.

I am a big advocate of responsible journalism, but I am not a fan of  media outlets that engage in irresponsible journalism.   That's why I liked "Scars of Grief", the story about the shutting down of a tabloid.  The quote that stood out for me was "That infected ink will never hurt anyone again."  I  did wonder why Eugen Bacon felt so strongly about this issue.

Another story that stood out for me was the final one, "Playback, Jury of the Heart" in which a man healed from a psychologically disastrous break up. I thought that a woman who played a central role in his recovery, who called herself a "body artist", was quite extraordinary.     

There were other stories that I considered good, but didn't impact me as much. There were also a number of stories that didn't impact me at all for personal reasons, but I still thought that every story in this anthology was well written.  

 

 

BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

AUTHOR LINKS: Website | Twitter 

 

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