Was blind but now I see – Andie Byrd Advising

Very tattered paperback copy of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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 and picking habits… but mostly I was so caught up in the epic romantic saga that I read it over and over. Scarlett O’Hara with her green eyes and her tiny waist and her beautiful gowns and her dashing beaux who would do anything to win her love. Plus, I always said I learned more about the history of the Civil War from GWTW than I did in school, where we just seemed to study the Revolutionary War again and again every year. (Hey, it was the Boston suburbs, we had sh*t to be proud of.) I didn’t exactly want to be Scarlett, but how could you not be compelled by the story of this courageous heroine?

How indeed? Welp. You could, for example, perhaps have realized that the enslavement of people of African descent is not simply a backdrop for a romance, and the end of that system is not something to bemoan. And that someone who personally benefits from and does everything in her power to perpetuate that system is perhaps not one of those “very fine people on both sides,” as has recently been said about a showdown between white supremacists and anti-racists.

Or you might be, y’know, nine years old and learning to make sense of the world from the stories around you. As I was. Picking up cues for who matters and who doesn’t. What’s OK to celebrate. And what’s an acceptable cost for that celebration.

Those stories have surrounded me for the nearly half-century I’ve been alive. The ones where Scarlett is the beloved heroine and Prissy — who Scarlett often threatens to whip or sell to an even crueler owner — is funny and stupid for being afraid to tell her owner that she, an uneducated enslaved teenager, does not actually know how to deliver a baby. And where the movie about that story wins All The Awards and lives in our memories for nearly eighty goddamn years as one of the greatest of all time. Really. It was the smash hit of 1939, a year that also includes The Wizard of Oz, so you do the math on what a grip this has on our culture.

That’s the river I’ve been swimming in for all my life, without even realizing there was a current. And if I ever expect myself to go in a different direction from the way it’s sweeping me, I’d better start doing some pretty serious swimming against the stream.

But when I stop floating on the surface, when I try to turn and use my small strength and unpracticed muscles to go against the current, sometimes it feels like drowning. I never realized how deep the water is. How very cold it gets below the surface. How strongly it pulls us all along.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past ten months: I’ve been on a crash course, trying to go back and see what the river has always swept me past. Reading and listening to and watching the other stories. I thought I’d share them here in case it’s useful to any other swimmers out there — or for any swimming teachers who might want to help with a lesson or two.

*I’ve put stars next to the items that have been especially important for me personally.

Books

All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
*The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein
*The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
*The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
So You Want to Talk about Race, Ijeoma Oluo
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, Michael Eric Dyson
Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup
Waking Up White, Debby Irving
*The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Tim Wise

Podcasts

*Seeing White: a 14-part documentary series exploring whiteness in America—where it came from, what it means, and how it works
*More Perfect Season 1 and Season 2
Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller: My Privilege Wake Up Call With Ijeoma Oluo, Author of So You Want To Talk About Race
This American Life Episode #550: Three Miles

Video

Other stuff

adrienne maree brown
“The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates
Harvard Implicit Bias Test
“Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Native-Land.ca

I have a huge and ever-growing list of what to read, watch, and listen to next. What should I add?