What can *I* do? How do I talk about race? S/o from BlsdMom’s post

[Stacia]

47 minutes ago, kand said:

This one would be worth its own thread. 

If anyone wants to spin this off into a separate thread, please feel free to do so.

 

[Stacia]

 I started reading Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie.

It was written in 2017 & from the introduction alone, I can tell this book is timely.

I was adding it to my GR page & noticed that it is currently free for kindle, which is why I wanted to go ahead & mention it here.

Quote

An eye-opening account of how Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color are uniquely affected by racial profiling and police brutality.

Amid growing awareness of police violence, individual Black men including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Freddie Gray have been the focus of most media-driven narratives.

Yet Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color also face daily police violence. Invisible No More places the individual stories of women and girls such as Sandra Bland, Dajerria Becton, Mya Hall, and Rekia Boyd into broader contexts, centering women of color within conversations around the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration.

Invisible No More also documents the evolution of a movement for justice for women of color targeted by police that has been building for decades, largely in the shadows of mainstream campaigns for racial justice and police accountability.

Informed by twenty years of research and advocacy by Black lesbian immigrant and police-misconduct attorney Andrea Ritchie, this groundbreaking work demands a sea change in how police violence is understood by mainstream media, policymakers, academics, and the general public, as well as a radical rethinking of our visions of safety and the means we devote to achieving it."

 

[Stacia]

There is a link in the thread to read the policy proposal.

 

 

[Stacia]

The National Book Festival (done by the Library of Congress) starts Friday. Online registration is free. They have an amazing round-up of authors, as well as many Q&A sessions slated with various departments at the Library of Congress.

Festival information page is here.

Wanted to post here because, if you don't want to pick your own schedule or are interested in a particular theme, they have a couple of themed topics. The theme I want to post here is "Hearing Black Voices".

Quote

Attendees are invited to follow three Timely Topic Threads that weave through the festival and offer a more profound appreciation for the subjects. They are:

• Democracy in the 21st Century, focusing on where democracy stands in the world today, sponsored in part by the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress
• Fearless Women, marking the 100th anniversary this year of women’s suffrage, sponsored by the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission
• Hearing Black Voices, showcasing Black voices across literary genres

and

Quote

Hearing Black Voices

Hearing Black Voices presents a diverse range of genres and points of view – from racism’s harsh realities and science fiction’s fantastical scenarios to lyrical poetry and searing memoir. For young people, there are books ranging from anti-racism and the little-known story of the Father of the Underground Railroad to Black women who have crashed through barriers to membership in STEM.

• Children
• Teens
• For Adults: Nonfiction
• For Adults: Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy
• For Adults: Poetry
• For Adults: Conversations

 

[Starr]

For Christian content take a look at Esau McCaulley.  He has a new book, Reading While Black, online podcasts and articles in the New York Times. He's a professor at Wheaton College. 

https://www.amazon.com/Reading-While-Black-American-Interpretation/dp/083085486X

[Carol in Cal.]

My favorite Christian book on this topic has been ‘Grace Matters’ but I am now reading another book by the same authors that I think might be even better, called ‘More Than Equals’.  The stance is once toward Biblical reconciliation and radical commitment to relationship.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Carol in Cal.

[Stacia]

I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned in this thread, but I definitely recommend reading When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele.

Wow. Just eye-opening. I don't really know what to say about it other than to recommend reading it.

Starred review from Publishers Weekly:

Quote

Activist Khan-Cullors, one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement, draws a clear line from her early life to her political activism in this potent memoir, co-written with Bandele (The Prisoner’s Wife). Over the course of the book, she plots the hardships she and her family experienced on a larger map of social and racial injustice in America. Steeped in humanity and powerful prose, Khan-Cullors’s memoir describes her brother’s battle with mental illness, her father’s drug addition, both of the men’s multiple encounters with the criminal justice system, and her own life in an economically disenfranchised Southern California community. She writes of how she “spent [her] childhood watching [her] brother get arrested” and of the ironies of inequity, as when, at the dinner table of a white schoolmate, she realizes that her friend’s nice father is her slumlord, “the very same man who allowed [her] family to subsist without a working refrigerator for the better part of a year.” She’s personally forthcoming, sharing the heartbreak she experiences as she loses her father and the healing she found among her community of activists. This is an eye-opening and eloquent coming-of-age story from one of the leaders in the new generation of social activists.