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
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.
