Racecar Report: Funny, I don’t look Jewish…
This morning, someone tried to take my white privilege away from me, and it was scary. When I feel attacked because I’m Jewish, what can that teach me about how safe I usually feel because I’m white?
Discovering America
In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, I will spend an hour re-listening to this amazing Seeing White podcast episode: “Little War on the Prairie.” Did you know that “we” deliberately mis-translated “Indian treaties” to leave out key provisions so we could trick them into signing bad deals, which we then repudiated anyway and turned into wars of […]
Have it your way
Summer of 1986. It’s hot and humid already at 6am as I’m on my way to start my shift at the 24-hour Burger King on the Mass Turnpike near my house. I’m walking fast and sweating in my too-big polyester uniform, desperately hoping none of the kids from school happen to see me because both […]
The Racecar Report
What I just learned about race here in my car while listening to The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist: slave-grown cotton in Massachusetts and the truth about zombies.
THIS. IS. NOT. HISTORY.
This. Is. Not. History. Most people running our country and policing our streets were either growing up when this happened, or were brought up by people who lived through this. This moment – which itself was not unique or isolated and was a product of the centuries that came before it – formed the moment […]
The Half Has Never Been Told
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 […]
Hysterical? It’s not even funny
When you call someone “hysterical” for protesting, say, Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court nomination or unfair umpires or workplace sexual harassment: There is a reason this is a gendered insult and it’s not just because oh, we traditionally associate over-emotionalism with women. “Hysterical” comes from the Greek “hustera” which literally means “womb.” Do I think people […]
This is not a story to pass on
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 […]
Truth.
I want to thank the troll who gave me an epiphany in an argument about affirmative action last weekend. Nah, not the one he was trying for, about how much fairer it would be to have a “purely meritocratic” system for college admissions. But in thinking about who gets in despite not really having shown […]
It’s summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summer Picnic team retreat! Borrowed our office’s fake trees for dressing up conference stages, draped the tables and chairs in “wood,” and loaded up the side table with fruit, cold cuts, potato chips, pies, and old-fashioned sodas. Everyone got a dollar-store flower pen and notebook re-covered in woodgrain shelf paper. Plus plastic bugs on the […]