Absolutely chilling. As in I’m literally shivering while I listen to this audiobook methodically examine the historical truths of how enslavement powered the economic and geographic expansion of our country. Gasps just from today’s drive: 1. Yeah sure we all learned “the invention of the cotton gin revolutionized cotton production.” But did any of us […]

Still feeling the echoes of finishing Toni Morrison’s Beloved this week. And the echoes of having been so wrong about how it would end. (Semi-spoiler ahead if you haven’t read it – and if you haven’t YOU SHOULD.) I listened to it slowly as an audiobook, read by Toni Morrison herself. Caught up in a […]

This is my copy of Gone with the Wind. I remember writing a book report on it in sixth grade, so I must have gotten it when I was at most ten years old. As you can see, I literally read it to tatters as a kid. Honestly, that’s partly because of my OCD-related pulling […]

I’ll be honest. This is the first year I have really *cared* about Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of “legal” enslavement of people in America as Union troops arrived to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas… two years after its signing, but better late than never, huh? Last June, like every year since I first […]

PSA: I am 12% into the audiobook of Ijeoma Oluo’s “So You Want To Talk About Race” and she’s already given me 3 insights that made me gasp. 1) “Do you think black people are poor for the same reasons white people are poor?” (spoiler alert: no) 2) So, my own lifelong focus on economic […]

Hey kids! I’ve got a story for y’all, in honor of today being Presidents Day, AND the 76th anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 which incarcerated tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent, AND we’re still in Black History Month. Guess what? All of those things are mashed up in a pair of […]