memoir

“Big Friendship” by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

June 14, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: How We Keep Each Other Close

Recommended to me by: Body Impolitic

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman name the difficulties of putting words to their friendship, and then as the professional writers they are, they go ahead and do it. I was worried that this book would be superficial or didactic, or both, but instead it is an engagingly told story with depth and detail, along with engagingly presented research into maintaining friendships.

They name Big Friendship, Shine Theory (invest in helping people shine rather than competing with them), and the friendweb they create together. They don’t shy away from discussing the hard parts of an interracial friendship.

They talk about stretching to maintain a friendship, and the difficulties of evaluating when stretch becomes strain, and what to do when the stretch feels unequal or too much.

They talk about Deborah Tannen’s term “complementary schismogenesis” (originally from Gregory Bateson) when two people get further and further apart as they try to model what they want from the other person, like one person talking louder and louder and the other talking quieter and quieter rather than asking the other person to speak up or speak more softly.

They reference For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend by Pat Parker.

Ultimately they went to couple’s counseling and learned to talk about their differences as well as the ways they are the same.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Mindful of Race” by Ruth King

April 30, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out

In the Introduction, Ruth King shares the effects of race on her own body and her own family as a Black woman living in the south of the US. Insight meditation has helped her manage the effects of racism, and she has created trainings that help others cure the heart disease of racism.

Part 1, Diagnosis, analyzes racism. Her writing is direct and clear. Here is how racism affects Black people. Here is how it affects white people. We have dominant and subordinated identities, like a white woman who is also chronically ill, or a Jewish person who passes as white. Here is how we can begin to get honest with ourselves and others about race.

Part 2, Heart Surgery, teaches the basics of mindfulness meditation. Here is how to invite the body to settle. Here are many specific phrases to say silently to ourselves or others in metta (kindness) meditation. For example, “When you feel deep sorrow, hopelessness, and despair, I will stay with you. I will breathe with you.”

Part 3, Recovery, gives tools for creating racial affinity discussion groups and making progress in dislodging racism from our hearts. Throughout the book, she gives examples of how listening deeply and making time for our emotional responses allows us to move through them and reach our vulnerable hearts.

Unlike The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda Magee which moves very slowly and seems to be trying to convince skeptical white people, this book lays out the truth and assumes people will do the work to absorb it.

Highly recommended.

Ruth King’s website with more about her Mindful of Race training program.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Inner Work of Racial Justice” by Rhonda V. Magee

August 28, 2020 by Sonia Connolly 2 Comments

Subtitle: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness

Rhonda V. Magee is a Black woman law professor at the University of San Francisco. She has studied mindfulness in depth, and uses it to get through difficult conversations about race with students as well as live with ever-present microaggressions. She teaches mindfulness to help people pause before reacting, increase inner tolerance for strong emotions, and to stay connected with themselves and others.

The first half of the book very gently and slowly encourages the reader to admit that racism exists and might be part of their lives. This is the opposite of Layla Saad’s direct approach in Me and White Supremacy. I can see that different approaches work well for different people.

The strongest message of the book is that we need to stay in mindful, non-violent conversation with each other (and ourselves) about race. Not until the last chapter does she add a caveat about retreating from people who threaten violence. I would add a second caveat about people who are simply not listening or engaging in good faith. Most of her examples include students or workshop participants who have chosen to learn from her, or community members who have an existing motivation to stay connected.

With the addition of those caveats, I agree that we are all in the racist soup together, each learning at our own pace, and we can do our best to be kind to people who are not as knowledgeable as we are, just as more knowledgeable people continue to be kind to us. I wanted to see more about reaching one’s limits and reacting with anger and frustration. There is a place for that, as well as a lot of good work to be done in the world with mindful listening.

Highly recommended for people who are new to anti-racist work, or new to meditation, but not both. I think it would be difficult to learn both from a book at the same time. I have some experience with both and the pace felt slow, but I still got a lot from the book.

Meditations and articles at Rhonda V. Magee’s website

Available at bookshop.org.

“You Don’t Say” by Nate Powell

August 17, 2020 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Collected Stories

Recommended to me by: a friend

This collection of short story out-takes in comic form was recommended to me for “Cakewalk,” about a white girl who dressed in blackface for Halloween, and “Like Hell I Will,” about the 1921 arson and massacre of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” a prosperous Black community. Tulsa race massacre on Wikipedia.

The Midwestern girl in “Cakewalk” is unaware of her transgression. She wants to be loved like Aunt Jemima, and doesn’t understand why the adults around her are horrified. No one explains it to her, even while she’s told to wash the charcoal off her face.

“Like Hell I Will” lays out the terrible, shameful history of the Tulsa race massacre. It is well-told and well-drawn, and at the same time minimized by its inclusion in this compendium of much less serious vignettes from white people’s perspectives.

Nate Powell is the illustrator for “March,” John Lewis’s autobiography in graphic novel form. That might be a better introduction to his work than this collection, which starts with comics drawing from his own life as a rootless young white man in the punk scene.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong

August 13, 2020 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: An Asian American Reckoning

Recommended to me by: Jesse-the-k

Cathy Park Hong describes minor feelings as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”

In this frank memoir, she describes growing up in LA’s Koreatown in a Korean immigrant family, complex friendships in college, and finding her voice as an artist in conversation with other artists, interwoven with Asian American experiences of racism.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.

Cathy Park Hong pulls off that tricky feat, asserting her own reality and showing us her life while also explaining what it’s like to be Korean in America for clueless white folks. Highly recommended!

Random House Books summary

Available at bookshop.org.

“Gathering Moss” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

July 13, 2020 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Recommended to me by: Reading Braiding Sweetgrass

A lyrical series of essays that weave together fascinating details about mosses and stories about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s life. She is an extraordinary storyteller.

Mosses are the most minimal plants. They survive by carefully funneling and holding onto water when it is available, and drying out without dying to await the next rainfall.

Mosses vary tremendously in shape and habitat. They match at a micro level the macro level of rainforests. Some mosses grow together with the old growth trees they drape along, and will not regrow if the moss is torn away. Some mosses persist along city sidewalks and buildings all over the world. Indigenous people use mosses where water absorbency is needed.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.