Accessing Black Voices Through Literature: Introduction
January 28 , 2021
We have read about and discussed racism, beginning with Robin DiAngelo and often from the point of view of white Americans. We want to be anti-Racist allies and we're just itching to take some action. What should we be doing? We think we understand the issues but don't understand WHY real progress is not being made. WHY do we consistently and repeatedly let Black Americans down? WHY aren't white people willing to give up a seat and make room ?
DiAngelo reminds us that the practice of our lives as a white collective has rarely been in alignment with the values we profess. She goes on to say that "Interrupting racism takes courage and intentionality; the interruption is by definition not passive or complacent. So in answer to the question, "Where do we go from here?," she says "I offer that we must never consider ourselves finished with our learning..." Her advice: Listen to Black voices.
For the next few months we hope to immerse ourselves in the published words of a selection of Black voices, beginning with the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Isabel Wilkerson and her recent book Caste. Some of you may have read the book already or perhaps have read reviews or seen Wilkerson in one of her many interviews. The book is well worth reading. We're recommending that you consider registering for BOLLI's two-session lecture: Isabel Wilkerson's Caste. For our January conversation, we will come together and share what we've learned from this Black voice.
Check out the BOLLI flyer below and you might also find the interviews worth a listen: NPR's Terry Gross and The Daily Show's Trevor Noah speak with Wilkerson shortly after the release of Caste. You may also be interested in a bit about her previous, highly regarded, book, The Warmth of Other Suns.
caste.pdf
It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System
Terry Gross Fresh Air August 4, 2020 (38:00)
Classifying People by Caste The Daily Show
Trevor Noah August 14, 2020 (7:21)
A brief introduction to Wilkerson's first book, The Warmth of Other Suns
Jill Lepore reviews the book in The New Yorker (August 30, 2010)
Isabel Wilkerson responds to questions about Emancipation and the Great Migration
Access the Jill Lepore review above or read the PDF below.
The Uprooted | The New Yorker.pdfIsabel Wilkerson and Carl Hancock Rux
The Greene Space @ WNYC and WQXR
July 23, 2013
(2:30)
An Abbreviated Bio of Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1961, to parents who left Virginia during the Great Migration. Her father was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. She studied journalism at Howard University. In 1994, while Chicago Bureau Chief for The New York Times, Wilkerson became the first woman of African American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her teaching experience involves stints at Emory, Princeton, Northwestern, and Boston University.
After fifteen years of research, she published her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, and in 2020, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It was recently announced that Ave DuVernay will direct, write, and produce an adaptation of Caste as a feature film for Netflix.
Here is a New York Times article written by Isabel Wilkerson in 2015. We've added it because she speaks to some of what we talked about in our Conversation on December 16th.
Wilkerson writes of the Atticus Finch in Go Set a Watchman, "He is a character study in the seeming contradiction that compassion and bigotry can not only reside in the same person but often do, which is what makes racial bias, as it has mutated through the generations, so hard to address."
She quotes David R. Williams, the Harvard sociologist who has appeared on many of these pages in video clips and articles that reference implicit bias: "As an American raised in this society with negative implicit biases against black people, you are not a bad person. You are simply a normal American. We have to come to grips with the reality that this racism is so deeply embedded in our culture that it shapes how we see the world, it shapes our beliefs, our behavior, our actions toward members of other groups. We have to examine ourselves in a profound way.”
In addition to discussing Caste, we will make sure to set aside time to address the events of the past several weeks: What happened? What happens next? And how do these events relate to the conversations we've been having in this group?
Click here to access materials to contextualize our discussion.