Royal Oak Book Club - June!

Event: Royal Oak Book Club

Date: Sunday, June 11 Time: 4:00 - 6:00 PM

Location: Amici's Pizza, 3249 12 Mile Rd, Berkley, Michigan 48072

Cost: Year-End Event - SWE-DET pays for food

Parking: Free - located behind the restaurant

Point of contact: Irina Sullivan irina.n.sullivan@gmail.com

Other info: Discussing "A Study in Scarlet Women" by Sherry Thomas  Review of "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates Review by Irina Sullivan

I believe that mourning the outcome of the most recent presidential election, as well as, organizing and resisting a threatening political climate necessarily includes deepening our understanding of the problems before us. The issue, as I saw it on November 9th, was two-fold - I needed both, a way to articulate my despair and a thoughtful counsel on mining for energy and perseverance so that I can be of use to my community in the years ahead. And this is how I arrived at brilliant and, sadly, timeless writing of James Baldwin and his best modern literary incarnation, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Baldwin’s unwavering, steady dismantling of, what we nowadays often call, white privilege was recently brought to the top of mind by a fantastic film “I Am Not Your Negro” based on Baldwin’s work of the same name. Coates’ voice is just as steady, relentless, and unapologetic, with an additional personal gravity of writing “Between the World and Me” as a letter to his teenage son. In one of the most memorable passages Coates describes an encounter with a white woman, who pushed his, then 5-year-old, son out of the way in her rush to get off an escalator. Reading this, I gasped in horror and despair, because when you feel powerless to protect your own child, you, his sole provider and defender, his everything, what is there that’s left but the undeniable truth that they are as vulnerable to a racist, violent, and unjust world as you always knew you were. When the hopes of shielding them from the hate are thoroughly shattered, however, another hope must come along - a hope that they are more than strong to face whatever the world throws at them, and in this Coates' counsel is best.