Read. Think. Act.

Catherine Read

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Waking Up White: And Finding Myself In The Story of Race

Waking Up WhiteThis book is life altering. Debby Irving’s journey to discover how white people fit into the discussion of race and racism has never been more important than it is today. It’s the sort of book I want everyone to read so we can all talk about it.

The author is the same age that I am. She grew up in a white suburb of Boston in the 60s and 70s with a homemaker mother and Harvard educated attorney father. Her life experiences are so very similar to mine, including the jarring realization that racism comes from centuries of institutional bias, cultural bias and a ruling class of white people that do not see their role in all of this.

I highly recommend the book. It’s is not preachy or academic. It’s one woman’s story of trying to understand her life in the context of race relations. More white people need to be motivated to do that. If we had a better understanding of how we got here, we would have a much better idea of the path forward. The situation isn’t going to change until we commit to change the one thing over which we have control – ourselves. The world changes when we shift our paradigm to see it from a different perspective.

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The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Sons(June 27, 2016) This is one of the most important books I have ever read. It is brilliantly written – a combination of deep research interwoven into the life stories of three people who migrated from the deep South to the cities of the North in a mass migration of the 20th Century that changed this country forever.

Isabel Wilkerson spent so many years researching this book and gathering the stories of over 1,200 African-Americans who were part of the mass migration that took place in from post World War I through the post Civil Rights Era of the 1970s. She settled on the stories of three individuals she got to know very well, and in her words, each deserving of their own book to tell their life story.

While many in the African-American community reject the idea that their Northern migration was an immigrant story, there are classic elements of that experience that Wilkerson points out throughout the book. Unlike other immigrants, assimilation into the broader American culture wasn’t simply a matter of changing a surname and losing an accent. The color of their skin sets them apart within a country and a culture of which they were a part before this country was ever founded by revolution.

This book is also a brutal indictment of an American history that we don’t know, don’t acknowledge and certainly don’t teach to school children. Our white washed narrative of the founding of this country does us all a disservice. Our mythological narrative of American values is at odds with a well documented history of brutality that impacts our country and our culture to this very day. We need to understand and own our own story . . . all of it.

I would love to stand on the floor of our Virginia Legislature and read this entire book aloud to the people who believe they know history. Those who think they have an understanding of what it means to be a Virginian, a Southerner and a lawmaker should be confronted with well documented history of how it really was – and how it really is – for blacks in this country. We are blind. And often it’s the blind leading the blind that perpetuates misguided ideas about solutions to the problems that continue to plague us.

This book should be part of every history curriculum in every high school in America. I highly recommend it. Lift the veil of ignorance and look at what we have done as a country. We can’t change the past, but we can do a much better job of changing our future when we understand that past.

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#BlackLivesMatter – Inside Scoop Virginia

A candid discussion on race and the impact of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In the first half of the show, Catherine is joined by Amanda Andere, a civic and non-profit leader based in Northern Virginia. In the second half she is joined by Cayce Utley, who is working with white allies of the movement to raise awareness of how we can more effectively support this effort.

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Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America – Eugene Robinson

May 23, 2011 – What a wonderful book! I love Eugene Robinson’s columns in the Washington Post and I have heard him speak in person. He’s a remarkable man who brings a lifetime of thought and experience to a subject few people talk about openly. I was truly fascinated by his segmentation of Black America into 4 distinct categories: the Transcendent, the Mainstream, the Emergent, and the Abandoned. His research is well done, the writing is engaging and his stories are memorable. For those living in the Washington, DC, area, his descriptions of the history and culture of the various neighborhood will bring a new perspective on how the city has evolved in the last 40 years. I would highly recommend to anyone. It serves to enrich our understanding of our fellow Americans in a way they didn’t teach us in school.