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Reading Wednesday
Jul. 15th, 2020 09:19 amRecently read
Finished The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook, which is about the initially successful push for civil rights after the Civil War and the white supremacist backlash that followed it, enshrining the "Jim Crow" segregation laws in the South. Brook told this story mostly through the lens of New Orleans' and Charleston's middle- and upper-class mixed-race communities ("Creoles of color," in Louisiana, and "Brown" in South Carolina) who had been free - and in some cases, owned slaves themselves - before the Civil War and found themselves losing rights as a black/white racial binary was imposed during and after it.
I knew basically nothing about this period of U.S. history, so as a history lesson, it was a fascinating and horrifying read. In a more abstract sense, its key takeaways are that a. race is a social construct (see: politically-motivated shifts in the definition of whiteness/blackness; the difficulty of actually enforcing segregation in New Orleans and Charleston, given their large mixed-raced and racially ambiguous populations), b. racism is a hell of a drug (among other things, it's gobsmacking how willing white supremacists were to burn the whole house down just to keep people of color from getting a seat at the table), and c. history is not a linear progression from oppression to equality.
On a wildly different note, I finally got around to reading the first of Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence books, The Secret Adversary, having read the rest of the series a few years back. Super cheesy and super charming!
Currently reading
The Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr and Barkskins by Annie Proulx
Finished The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook, which is about the initially successful push for civil rights after the Civil War and the white supremacist backlash that followed it, enshrining the "Jim Crow" segregation laws in the South. Brook told this story mostly through the lens of New Orleans' and Charleston's middle- and upper-class mixed-race communities ("Creoles of color," in Louisiana, and "Brown" in South Carolina) who had been free - and in some cases, owned slaves themselves - before the Civil War and found themselves losing rights as a black/white racial binary was imposed during and after it.
I knew basically nothing about this period of U.S. history, so as a history lesson, it was a fascinating and horrifying read. In a more abstract sense, its key takeaways are that a. race is a social construct (see: politically-motivated shifts in the definition of whiteness/blackness; the difficulty of actually enforcing segregation in New Orleans and Charleston, given their large mixed-raced and racially ambiguous populations), b. racism is a hell of a drug (among other things, it's gobsmacking how willing white supremacists were to burn the whole house down just to keep people of color from getting a seat at the table), and c. history is not a linear progression from oppression to equality.
On a wildly different note, I finally got around to reading the first of Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence books, The Secret Adversary, having read the rest of the series a few years back. Super cheesy and super charming!
Currently reading
The Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr and Barkskins by Annie Proulx
