June 2015: The Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson)

Post date: Jun 14, 2015 11:56:38 PM

Jane and Sherrill arrived a few minutes early so were able to enjoy Mary Ann's pleasant new garden plantings in the bright evening of June 11 before a few more folks showed up for our discussion of Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. Jane had read the book before some time ago, but was glad to reread it, as there were things she picked up the second time through. We felt it was a good follow-on to our May book, and all agreed that Wilkerson did a good job of weaving sociology and history in with the story lines of her three "protagonists", although the jumping around in their timelines seemed rather arbitrary at times. Several of us were also annoyed by her frequent repetition of information, sometimes with only a few pages between references it seemed. Barbara felt that Wilkerson was selling pretty hard the idea that the new arrivals from the south were better educated and more likely to succeed than the African Americans they joined in the north, and wondered how true that was. Sherrill's felt that it took significant resources to make the trip, both financially and emotionally, and those factors probably helped them succeed when they arrived as well. People also shared personal memories: Jane recalled being shocked by "whites only" signs when visiting the south when she was young. Barbara felt that she was completely isolated from the civil rights movement while at Smith, though Mary Ann remembered that there had been people from Smith who went to Selma. Barbara and Karen are both children of immigrants, and we discussed how white skinned second generation immigrants are indistinguishable from their native born contemporaries, while black skinned children are still identified as "other", no matter how northern and citified they have become. The world of racial politics in Berkeley Public schools was also discussed. I'd say we overall were rather discouraged about how many problems we still see in terms of segregation and bigotry and how difficult it is to see a path to real change. Sherrill did proffer the hopeful example of gay marriage: you would not have gotten anybody to take a bet 10 years ago that so much of America would be so accepting of gay marriage today. Seeing and hearing Barack Obama on TV must have to counteract some stereotypes. Karen said that she thinks it was Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice that are the real examples, because they stood out as the only non-crazy people in the Bush-Cheney years. On the other hand, Karen points out that more white Americans probably have a friend or relation who is gay than one who is black, so maybe the gay marriage example is not really a good model.