Awakening

I’m not sure if this is unique to me or not, but I have the ability to awaken myself from a nightmare. There are times I’ll be having any nature of unpleasant dream, and somewhere from the depths of unconsciousness, I realize that I am dreaming and have the ability to wake myself. I choose not to continue in the yuckiness of whatever mental storm I’m currently dwelling. I rarely pay much attention to this at the time (because I promptly fall back asleep), but now that I think about it, it’s quite a superpower. How great it would be if we all had the power to interrupt a bad moment, end the nightmare, and move on to something happy – just by willing it to happen.

As I take inventory of the reading I did during the past year, there is a remarkable, albeit unintentional, trend. Of all the books I read during 2019, 14 of them had themes or portions related to race and cultural bias. I didn’t necessarily set out to do this; perhaps the choices arose from a variety of things that defined 2019 – current political dynamics, workplace conversations around equity, sermons from my podcast church pulpit designed to deconstruct some of the historical religious constructs of Christianity, a widening circle of friends who bring previously unfamiliar perspectives to my attention. Whatever the cause, the effect of this year of study has had the opposite effect of my nightmare-ending superpower. Through my reading, I often transition from my comfortable life of multiple privileges into a literary world where unfairness, hatefulness, and hopelessness define the lives of those who have told their stories. Authors have shown me realities I’d been blind to and led me to question lots of what I have known to be true. It has been jarring, embarrassing, and infuriating. By sheer accident of birth, my white skin, middle-class upbringing, heterosexual preference, and Christian heritage give me the ability to have these new learnings and then jolt myself out of their realities back into my world of previously invisible privilege. In this blog, I want to introduce you to my year of themed reading and pay homage to a group of authors who helped to open my eyes.

• Becoming, Michelle Obama
  • To Michelle Obama, your journey as a gifted young student from Chicago’s south side to America’s leading family was truly inspiring. It confirmed the importance of education and revealed to me afresh how uneven the playing field really still is.
• For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too, Christopher Emdin
  • To Christopher Emdin, thank you for writing a book to open my eyes to the experiences of children of color in schools and begin to help me translate cultural norms which have collided so damagingly over the years.
• No One Ever Asked, Katie Ganshert
  • To Katie Ganshert, thank you for weaving a story that could easily have been taking place around the corner from my house. Your book created a way to see how the subtleties of suburban culture are often rife with racism when viewed from the perspectives of people of color.
• White Fragility: Why It’s So hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo
  • To Robin DiAngelo, I appreciate the overdue bluntness about the self-preserving and stereotypical “poor me” behaviors that are so nails-on-the-chalkboard for people of color who’ve spent a lifetime awaiting the awakening of white culture.
• Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
  • To Octavia Butler… just wow. Your creative narrative that toggled back and forth between antebellum Maryland and modern California revealed the perspective of a 20th century character as she time traveled into a culture of slavery. The images and lessons from this book still haunt me.
• A Mercy, Toni Morrison
  • To Toni Morrison, thank you for leaving a legacy of your words that taught me about the earliest enslaved people to arrive in what is now America, and the endlessly long road that has led to a glimmer of racial reckoning in 2019.
• Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
  • To Bryan Stevenson, as I wrote in my earlier blog, I’m still shaken by what is akin to emperor-has-no-clothes revelations about the fairness of our so-called “justice” system and how contradictory the notion of a death penalty is when held tightly by many pro-life advocates. I’m now trying to muster the courage to go see your movie.
• Summer of ’69, Elin Hildebrand
  • To Elin Hildebrand, your book counted for me as a lovely beach read, but the interracial dynamics still taught me and connected with the many other texts that filled the year.
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris
  • To Heather Morris, each year I decide on one book that I want my circle of people to read – family, friends, usually around 15 others. I choose the book because of its universal message and power to make its readers better human beings. Yours was the one I chose and purchased for my people in 2019. Thank you for telling this important story.
• Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah
  • To Trevor Noah, while you interlaced the telling of your story with exciting and often hilarious adventures, the lessons and realities of race were poignant and often shocking. Your survival and ability to thrive as an adult are a testimony to the human spirit and a few small miracles (and your mother’s prayers) along the way.
• Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times, Irshad Manji
  • To Irshad Manji, thank you for challenging the categories and binaries I witlessly created in an effort to try to make sense of the world (but which ultimately limited my ability to see it clearly). Thank you also for providing examples of how to have open respectful dialog with those holding different views – “speak like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong” has changed my world.
• Waking up White, Debby Irving
  • To Debby Irving, I’m grateful to have had a middle-aged white female model for stumbling (often ungracefully and cluelessly) through a journey of awakening. And the chapter on the G. I. Bill… I’m still reeling.
• The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough
  • To Paul Tough, while your book may not have necessarily set out to be about race, any text that describes structures of higher education and the attempts to open access to a broader spectrum of students cannot be told without the reality of elite protectionism. You wrote of dirty little secrets that the College Board would probably prefer audiences not read and you told stories of ordinary heroes that are fighting an uphill battle to change future landscapes of education.
• On the Brink of Everything; Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old, Parker J. Palmer
  • To Parker Palmer, I’d love to have dinner with you. The wisdom, perspective, wit, and honesty with which you wrote this retrospective of your past 80 years was such an important thing for me to read during the course of my 50th birthfest.

Fittingly, words from one of Parker Palmer’s essays expressed an appropriate bookend to my year.

“On a planet where white people are in the minority, the arrogance of ‘white is normal’ is breathtaking – and like all arrogance, it distorts one’s view of self and world. For example, for fifty years, I’ve written and spoken about the dangers of the American tendency to make those who are not white, straight, Christian, etc., into ‘the other.’ But not until the last couple of decades did I understand that I am ‘the other’ to many. I’d reserved that category for people who didn’t fit my delusional ‘norm.’ I didn’t hate or fear the other, but seeing otherness in everyone except myself and ‘my people’ is the road to a sense of superiority and even uglier destinations. Does all of this make me guilty of something sinister simply because I was born white? Of course not. No one is born guilty of anything. The guilt comes when I deny that my whiteness gives me social advantages and makes my view of the world distorted and dishonest. Denial keeps me from owning my own arrogance, putting on corrective lenses, and fully joining the fight against the pestilence of white supremacy.”

To all of these pen-wielding teachers, I owe a debt. I stand embarrassingly close to the starting gate of this journey to “own my arrogance”, but if the past year’s pages have taught me anything, it’s that 2020’s reading must go deeper in the same direction rather than in a different one, even if it often feels like a bad dream from which I cannot force myself to awaken.