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522. The Person You Mean to Be

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Dolly Chugh

Genre:   Non Fiction, Public Policy, Sociology

325 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Person You Mean to Be, social psychologist Dolly Chugh discusses her approach to confronting difficult issues including sexism, racism, inequality, and injustice in an attempt to make the world (and yourself) better. Dolly also discusses the causes of inequality and her research findings in unconscious bias.

Quotes 

“Equality says we treat everyone the same, regardless of headwinds or tailwinds. Equity says we give people what they need to have the same access and opportunities as others, taking into account the headwinds they face, which may mean differential treatment for some groups.”

 

 “Challenge yourself to hear their experience without questioning its expression. Avoid being the tone police.”

 

 “We redefine what it means to be a good person as someone who is trying to be better, as opposed to someone who is allowing themselves to believe in the illusion that they are always a good person.”

 

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, “I was wrong.” —

 

“If you are in the sun and I am in the rain, why is it divisive for me to point out this difference? What is really divisive is telling someone who is standing in the rain that it is not raining.”

 

“Antiracist educator and author Debby Irving uses an often-cited headwinds and tailwinds metaphor to explain the invisibility of these systemic, group-level differences. Headwinds are the challenges — some big, some small, some visible, some invisible — that make life harder for some people, but not for all people. When you run against a headwind, your speed slows down and you have to push harder. You can feel the headwind. When you have a tailwind pushing you, it is a force that propels you forward. It is consequential but easily unnoticed or forgotten. In fact, if you are like me when I jog with a tailwind, you may glow with pride at your great running time that day, as if it were your own athletic prowess. When you have the tailwind, you will not notice that some runners are running into headwinds. They may be running as hard as, or even harder than, you, but they will appear lazier and slower to you. When some of them grow tired and stop trying, they will appear self-destructive to you.”

 

 “Loving America is the most American of things to do. Why does loving America preclude an honest understanding of our history and its influence in our lives?”

 

 “When we feel sorry for someone, we inadvertently put ourselves in the high-power position.”

 

 “The more we care about something, the more likely we are to willfully ignore negative relevant information about it. The more we care about something, the less we want to know.”

 

My Take

A lot of woke perspective in this book.  The author makes some good points, but applying “equity of result” rather than “equality of opportunity” is likely to have a lot of unintended, negative consequences.

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503. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth and Sue Deans

Author:   Isabel Wilkerson

Genre:   Nonfiction, History, Cultural

622 pages, published September 7, 2010

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the decades-long migration of six million black Americans who fled Jim Crow South in search of a better life and landed in the north and western parts of the United States.  In researching the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, but focuses on three individuals:  Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success; George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where fought for civil rights; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 for Los Angeles to pursue a medical career and became the personal physician to Ray Charles.  All faced discrimination and hardship but still felt that leaving the South was the right thing to do.

Quotes 

“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

 

“It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.”

 

“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance…. Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential…. There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem–a magnanimous understanding by both races–is the first step toward its solution.”

 

 “The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”

 

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”

 

 “Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”

 

 “Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.”

 

“The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close to fifty when its effects were truly felt. He did not begrudge the younger generation their opportunities. He only wished that more of them, his own children, in particular, recognized their good fortune, the price that had been paid for it, and made the most of it. He was proud to have lived to see the change take place.  He wasn’t judging anyone and accepted the fact that history had come too late for him to make much use of all the things that were now opening up. But he couldn’t understand why some of the young people couldn’t see it. Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people.”

 

 “Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself. Some spoke of specific and certain evils. Some lived in tight-lipped and cheerful denial. Others simply had no desire to relive what they had already left. The facts of their lives unfurled over the generations like an over-wrapped present, a secret told in syllables. Sometimes the migrants dropped puzzle pieces from the past while folding the laundry or stirring the corn bread, and the children would listen between cereal commercials and not truly understand until they grew up and had children and troubles of their own. And the ones who had half-listened would scold and kick themselves that they had not paid better attention when they had the chance.”

 

 “That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite,” he said. “Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it.”

 

My Take

In The Warmth of Other Suns,  Pulitizer prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson thoroughly researched her seminal book on the black migration out of the Jim Crow south and is very informative about an often overlooked part of American history.  Her focus on three migrants of different socio-economic classes and their experiences helps bring the story to life and makes the experience much more relatable to the reader.

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470. So You Want to Talk about Race

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth, Sue Deans

Author:   Ijeoma Oluo

Genre:   Non Fiction, Politics, Sociology, Cultural, Public Policy

248 pages, published January 16, 2018

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers her take on the racial landscape in America, addressing issues including privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word.

Quotes 

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.”

 

“If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system of you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice, it is not something you can just opt out of.”

 

“To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.”

 

“1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race. 2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. 3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.”

 

“You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society. White Supremacy is, as I’ve said earlier, insidious by design. The racism required to uphold White Supremacy is woven into every area of our lives. There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist.”

 

“Systemic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces.”

 

“And if you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist. If you are able-bodied, you are ableist. If you are anything above poverty in a capitalist society, you are classist. You can sometimes be all of these things at once.”

 

My Take

I read So You Want to Talk About Race as part of my Boulder Rotary Club book group.  While the women who assigned it were well meaning, I found it to be a very offensive, counterproductive book.  It’s hard to take Ijeoma Oluo too seriously when she spends a chapter talking about how soft her hair is and how much she resents people asking to touch it.  Really?  My bigger issue with this polemical book is her basic premise that America is systemically racist.  This is the big lie being perpetrated in 2020.  If you disagree with this viewpoint, read Heather MacDonald’s comprehensive article on the subject (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice).  The police make approximately 10 million arrests a year.  For the last five years, the police have fatally shot about 1,000 civilians annually, the vast majority of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.  In 2019, the police shot 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims, 0.2% of the total.  This hardly constitutes an epidemic of police brutality.  Moreover, defunding the police will only worsen conditions in minority areas.

Tellingly, Oluo, whose mother is white and whose father is from Nigeria, routinely criticizes her mother who struggled as a single mother to raise Oluo and her brother after being abandoned by her black husband when Oluo was a toddler, while having nothing negative to say about her absentee father who provided her with zero support as she grew up.  Indeed, I believe that absent fathers is the real crisis in the black community which has a shockingly high 77% out of wedlock childbirth rate.  Children raised in single parent households face myriad obstacles that negatively impact their life prospects.  I (and many others) assert that this is the primary cause of black underperformance rather than systemic white supremacy argued by Oluo.  Today, the only law on the books which discriminates on the basis of race is affirmative action.  Accusing Americans of being white supremacists may make Oluo and others like her feel better, but it will do little to improve the lives of other black Americans.  To do that, the black community needs to take a cold-eyed look at their culture and advocate changes to it that will actually make a difference.

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442. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Economics, History, Public Policy

342 pages, published January 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Factfulness is an exploration of how the world is doing so much better than people think.  When asked simple questions such as why the world’s population is increasing, how many young women go to school, or how many people live in poverty, most people get the answers wrong by a large order of magnitude regardless of their education, experience or expertise.  Written by Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, along with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, methodically demonstrates how the world is doing much better than we might think.

Quotes 

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

 

“Look for causes, not villains.”

 

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

 

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

 

“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

 

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

 

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

 

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.”

 

“The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want”

 

“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”

 

“And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

 

“Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

 

“The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.”

 

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”

 

My Take

While Factfulness is an interesting book, it reminded me very much of two other books that I have read on my quest:  Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks.  All of these books preach the same message, i.e. that things are actually going a lot better in the world than we think they are and that worldwide poverty is in decline.  Factfulness author Hans Rosling backs everything up with facts and makes a compelling case.  I’m not sure how things are going in the world in the age of covid-19 and global shutdown.  I’m hoping we can get back on the positive trajectory that Rosling describes.

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404. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans

Author:  Alex Kotlowitz

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Sociology

304 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Alex Kotlowitz, the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, embeds himself in Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods during one summer to give a report from the inside.  The violence is staggering.  Over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire.  An American Summer paints a bleak portrait of despair and violence in America.

Quotes 

“. . .you can’t talk about death without celebrating life. How amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that’s slumping around them. How despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back. How in death there is love.”

 

“There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.”

 

“In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony…”

 

“Do you directly target the violence because it so discourages any kind of economic development? Or do you bring in jobs and rehab homes, knowing that with a sense of opportunity the violence will diminish?”

 

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

 

“I’m going to share something I learned since I been here and that is us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…”

 

“People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.”

 

“You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.”

 

“The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way.”

 

My Take

Man, this was a depressing book.  While Alex Kotlowitz does a good job of vividly describing the heartbreaking violence and hopelessness in the gang infested parts of Chicago, he offers no solutions.  We discussed this book at my Rotary book club and also were disheartened.  There are no easy answers.

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175. Polio: An American Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans and Darla Schueth

Author:   David M. Oshinsky

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Science, Medicine, Public Policy

342 pages, published September 1, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In Polio:  An American Story, Historian David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of a world terrorized by polio and the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines.  Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. We also get an inside look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O’Connor and which revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America.

 

 

My Take

For the past five years, I have been a member of the Boulder Rotary Club.  From my first meeting, I became aware that eradicating polio from the face of the earth has been a long time mission of all Rotarians throughout the world and indeed, Rotarians have contributed mightily to making that happen.  Our Rotary Club just launched a book group for our club (how could I not join) and given Rotary’s history, it was no surprise that our first selection was Polio:  An American Story.  What was surprising was how much I enjoyed this book.  A well-deserved Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History (2006) and the Herbert Hoover Book Award (2005),   Oshinsky takes a potentially dry subject and breaths fascinating life into it.  Through the lens of polio, we see how the scientific, cultural, sociological and historical shifts in our nation as we progressed through the twentieth century.  Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio:  An American Story provides fresh insight into post World War II era America.

 

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