A Book Recommendation: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

                                                                    
I can hear your objections now.         

"My book list is too long as it is."
"The stack of books on my nightstand are about to fall over."
"Everyone seems to be recommending books I must read now. Please no more."

Well, too bad, because here is one more book, and before you order it from your local independent bookstore, you might ask your teenage grandchild or neighbor, if they have a copy. That might truly be the case.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas https://angiethomas.com/the-hate-u-give is a young adult (YA) title published in 2017, and it won all sorts of awards, including a Coretta Scott King Honor Award and the Honor Book designation from the American Library Association. It has also been made into a movie. 

I had heard about the book, seen it in stores and noticed it on many lists, but I don't read many YA books. When I do, however, I usually enjoy and appreciate them. I found a brand new copy of this book in a Little Free Library when I was on a morning walk and inside the cover the person who donated the book wrote "Black Lives Matter. Please read and pass on." 

I set aside all the other books waiting to be read, including a shelf full of nonfiction books about white privilege and the history of racial relations in this country and all the things we need to do and know now. I will return to that necessary and worthwhile task, as part of re-educating myself. But often a novel touches my heart and frees me to imagine myself into realities I have not experienced. When I read a piece of fiction that is so well-written, as this book is, I become part of the story. I no longer look from the outside in or from the present back to the past.

I am part of the setting and the time period. I am one of the characters--or maybe more than one. I experience the story as it unfolds, and that allows me to learn more on a heart level. 

The story in The Hate U Give is not unfamiliar, unfortunately.  A young black man confronted by police for no real reason and the tragic and far-reaching results of that. This was published in 2017, as I said, but it could have been published today, and you will feel that, too. 

I didn't always understand the language or the cultural references, being a white woman in her 70's, nor can I possibly feel the same anger or fear felt by the characters in the book, but the book illustrates what happens when humans do not treat other humans as human. It also illustrates when humans do treat other humans as humans, and that according to Austin Channing Brown, the author of I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, another book on my long list, is the work of anti-racism. 

The main character in the book is the primary witness to the killing of her friend, and her dilemma is how to respond. I am quite sure Angie Thomas, the author of the book, was familiar with the words of Rep John Lewis, "Never ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble." 

Reading a book relevant to what is happening in our country now--or not happening-may not seem as if it can make a difference, but I think the reading I choose to do opens me to the ways I am racist. I may not do obvious racist things, like yelling "White Power," or beating someone up or tearing up a Black Lives Matter sign, but I have racist thoughts, and it is my job to become clear about what they are.

The theologian Walter Brueggeman asked "How can this time of unease be holy time?" This time becomes holy when we dare to listen to the pain and history and fears and hopes and dreams of others, but also when we dare to listen to the uncomfortable thoughts and beliefs and assumptions we hold within ourselves. 

So I repeat what Austin Channing Brown said in a recent conversation with Brene Brown, (podcast)  "The work of anti-racism is to become a better human in order to treat other humans better."

An Invitation

What inspires you to be a better human? What are you learning about yourself as a racist? 

A final note: What a privilege it was when I was on a civil rights tour in 2018 to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma where John Lewis and so many other brave souls walked, in order to make us all better humans. 

 

Minnesota Nice?

Engraving on wall at the National Lynching Museum, Montgomery, Alabama

When my husband and I returned in 1974 to Minnesota, our home state, from St Louis where Bruce had gone to medical school, and I had taught high school English in an inner ring suburb, we couldn't figure out what was wrong. Something was missing. 

Soon we realized what was missing were Black people. We had become used to living and working in a much more integrated environment, and returning to Minnesota, we were struck by how white our state was. 

And remains.

But, I admit, with time I stopped thinking about that fact. I acclimated easily to the culture in which I had been raised--that of white privilege. 

I shudder now to remember that one of the classes I was assigned to teach at Webster Groves High School was called "The Outnumbered." I vaguely remember a series of paperback textbooks with stories and poetry and essays by minority writers. I don't think I had studied or been introduced to any of those writers in any of my college courses, but maybe there had been a Langston Hughes poem thrown in there now and then. And I certainly remember hearing Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have A Dream" speech, but my awareness of anything beyond white male literature was severely limited. 

Many of my students were African American kids whose families had been able to move out of inner city St Louis into a suburb, where they hoped to find better schools and better living conditions. Now I wonder what business did I, a white woman educated at a small liberal arts college with a Scandinavian background, have teaching content so foreign to what I knew about life. I hope I was sensitive. I hope I was open. I hope I listened. I hope I learned as much, if not more, than my students. 

In recent years, all these decades later, I have despaired at the statistics about life for African Americans in Minnesota--the disparities in income, employment, education, health, and housing ETC. ETC, and yet Minnesota always scores high in church attendance, as well as  philanthropic giving. I have wondered, "What is our problem?" Aren't Minnesotans nice people? Do we not deserve our reputation as a progressive state?



The last few days I have seen many different lists of resources to read or watch. Several titles on the lists are books I bought before or after the Civil Rights Tour we went on the fall of 2018. I read some during that time, but it is time to return to that shelf. One of the books recommended, especially for Minnesotans, is A Good Time for the Truth, edited by Sun Yung Shin and published in 2016. 




I had read some of the essays already, but decided to begin again, reading with the eyes of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd.
I started with an essay by David Mura,  "A Surrealist History of One Asian American In Minnesota," in which he includes several explanations for why racial disparities in Minnesota are so great. 
             * The white people here are very white. To be white
             in Minnesota is different from being white in the South.
             A Southerner, whether a racist or not, knows that black
             people have lived in the South as long as white people;
             their history is intertwined...The issues of race don't 
             exist in Lake Wobegon, and that's the way white
             Minnesotans want to think of their state.
             * The white people here don't like controversy or
             conflict. They like insisting that things are just fine...
             So many white people here subscribe to the following
             tautological wheel: The only time we encounter racial
             tensions is when the subject of race comes up. So the way
             to keep away tensions is to not talk about race. If no one
             is talking about race, then that must mean racism no 
             longer exists.
             * The white people here like to think of themselves as
             nice people. ...The southern white author understands 
             that evil exists and evil has existed in their world. They 
             understand not only that white Southerners are capable 
             of being not nice but that they have been capable of
             great cruelties. But the Duluth lynching? That's an
             anomaly here. It's not really reflective of who Minnesota
             was, much less does it have any connection to what
             Minnesota is... pp. 53-54.

Ouch! 

I remember when dinner table conversation turned political or even if anyone disagreed on a given topic, my mother would say, "Now we are just going to have happy talk." 

Apparently, that's Minnesota. 

We have a lot to overcome, and I hope we will help each other do that. 

An Invitation
What beliefs about yourself get in the way of creating positive social change? I would love to know. 

NOTE: I also recommend a more recent book by David Mura, A Stranger's Journey, Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing.