Read. Think. Act.

Catherine Read

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Mustard Seed – Laila Ibrahim

(March 2018) We don’t get to pick how big our good gets to be, but each of us picks if we gonna do some good right where we are.”– Mattie Freedman

One of my favorite passages from this remarkable book.

Mustard Seed is a sequel to Ibrahim’s Yellow Crocus, and as historical fiction goes, it’s outstanding. The narrative of both books unfolds in Virginia. And the author captures so vividly the lives of slaves both before the Civil War and the injustices done to them afterward.

While attending a session at the SXSW Education conference today on Black Education in America, the very wise Dr. Howard Fuller of Marquette University made this observation: “There is a difference between being liberated and being free.” It sent a shiver up my spine for how it perfectly captured the story of Mustard Seed.

In the 1850s, Mattie escapes Fair Oaks Plantation with her daughter Jordon to join her husband Emanuel and their son Samuel who earlier escaped to the free state of Ohio. Returning to Virginia in 1868 to extricate her newly “freed” cousin Sarah from the plantation, Mattie and her family experience some of the most egregious oppressions of Reconstruction. Slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery transformed into mass incarceration. As evident in Virginia today as it is in many other parts of the United States.

There were moments in this book that made me want to scream out loud. It truly touched a raw nerve after a floor speech by Del. Nick Freitas (R-Culpeper) on Friday, March 2nd, that threw the House of Delegates into chaos. In his remarks are the historic echoes of enraged white men – as if it was transferred genetically from one generation in Virginia to the next.

Today, I watched on YouTube as three African American Delegates stood on the floor of that same House chamber and addressed Delegate Freitas’s remarks. Delegates Luke Torian, Delores Quinn and Lamont Bagby pushed back. As they should. Because the story of what happened in Richmond in the past few days is not so different from the story this book tells. Racism, oppression and injustice is woven in the fabric of Virginia’s culture.

“We realize that we live in a ugly political moment. So while we were offended, we were not surprised,” Bagby said. “It should embarrass every member of this body that we have allowed such rhetoric to enter these chambers. Bringing up a very painful past to make a political point is disgusting and poisonous.”

Our history does not have to define our future. However, ignorance of our history most assuredly allows past wrongs to go unacknowledged and ignorance to be perpetuated by future generations. Historical fiction has a place in education when it is based on thorough research and grounded in factual and verifiable accounts. You feel what the characters are going through, not just absorbing a recounting of events.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who can read and everyone who considers themselves a Virginian.

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Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

Reading with Patrick (Aug 2017) Maybe a record of someone’s private thoughts is worthless anywhere. Certainly in jail — contraband is worth more. But I wondered if it was especially worthless in the Delta, where a calm place to read was hard to come by; where there wasn’t a bookstore for a hundred miles and families couldn’t afford a book, anyhow; and where a teacher once burst into my classroom to scold me for having the kids write about the death of a classmate, not wanting them to feel sympathy for him.

I love this book so much. As Patrick would say, “It’s real.”

Michelle Kuo has gifted to this world such an extraordinary testimony — both hers and Patrick Browning’s.

It’s a beautiful literary work that is full of thought and introspection. It is a meditation on the great questions of the human experience and how books and writing and poetry impact how we see our world.

All that beauty is wrapped around the gritty reality of rural poverty, racism, history denied, mass incarceration, failed education policies, despair, addiction and violence. And yet – there is also faith, family, resilience and love.

This story of how a daughter of Taiwanese immigrant parents, born and raised in Michigan and educated at Harvard, ended up in the Mississippi Delta teaching at an alternative school, has more plot twists than you can imagine. Only this is no work of fiction. It’s an extraordinary personal journey.

I feel inadequate to the task of reviewing this book. There is not a “genre” for this kind of non-fiction literature. It weaves the well researched history of racism and poverty in rural Helena, Arkansas, together with the writings of Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and the poetry of Yeats, Tennyson, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Ms. Kuo and Patrick explore Haiku together day after day in a jail visitors room. She has him write letters – to his daughter and to the man he killed. Those things may seem to be incongruous on their face, but it’s about the transformative power of words, ideas and the experience of those before us to help us see who we are.

“Bad conditions could impel one to leave, but they could also sap one’s strength to go.” I found so much in these pages that resonated. I felt the struggle of the place, of the people, and the determination of this teacher to help Patrick to find in himself the things he could not see.

I highly recommend this book to every reader as it a story deeply rooted in the power of education to change lives.

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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

(Feb. 2017) I loved spending time with Michael Eric Dyson – in my car and in my kitchen. Hearing him read his own words felt very intimate to me.

He subtitles this book a sermon but I felt it was a conversation. I was not being lectured to or preached at. He refers to the listener often as “beloved” and that moniker felt genuine to me. His purpose in reaching out to us is to draw us in to see a world we may not understand.

My first thought after finishing this book is that ignorance is a choice. People walk among us harboring prejudice and biases because they have chosen not to know the world – not because anyone is preventing them from knowing the world.

I would highly recommend this audiobook. The fact that “sermon” is in the title might put a lot of people off, but don’t be put off.

The thought of spending what precious years I have on this earth living an unexamined life is anathema to me. It also perpetuates beyond my lifetime the institutional racism and sexism that plagues our country. That is not the legacy I want to leave behind for my children and grandchildren.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to see this book chosen by bookclubs across America as a work they want to read and discuss? It’s necessary to change people’s hearts before you change their minds. Michael Eric Dyson approaches his subject that way and his words are very compelling.

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Something Must Be Done about Prince Edward County

Prince Edward CountyThis book is about finding a way forward through reconciliation. Kristen Green writes a compelling book about a tragic and terrible part of Virginia’s history. There are many Virginians who don’t know the story of what happened in Prince Edward County or that plaintiffs from Moton High School were part of the Brown v. Board of Education case decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 that declared school segregation to be unconstitutional.

The author discovered that her grandfather was instrumental in the massive resistance movement that closed all the public schools and created a whites only private academy. Black school children were shut out of getting a public education from 1959 to 1964 while Green’s own parents attended the private all white academy funded by “tuition grants” paid out of county tax money. Her own education and that of her brothers was also in that same private academy. Her sense of guilt and her search for meaning is palpable throughout the entire book. I believe that in researching and writing this book, she is engaging in an act of atonement.

For those who have seen the Civil Rights memorial at the Virginia State Capitol, just a short distance from the Governor’s Mansion, you will recognize the name Barbara Johns who led a student walkout at Moton High School in 1951. The former Robert Russa Moton High School is now a Civil Rights Museum in Farmville – the only Civil Rights museum in Virginia. Quite ironically, the only Vice-Presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence will be held at Longwood University on Oct. 4th, just down the street from the Moton Museum.

The additional twist? That Civil Rights monument at the state capitol honoring Barbara Johns and acknowledging what happened in Prince Edward County was unveiled in 2008 by then Governor Tim Kaine.Read More

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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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Just Mercy – A Story of Justice and Redemption

Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson (July 2016) This book was just a great followup to Isabelle Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Bryan Stevenson brings home the reality of a racially driven criminal justice system that is out of control. The headlines around mass incarceration, the executions as well as the exonerations of prisoners on death row, the investigative journalism around the blatant miscarriage of justice – it all comes together in this book. Told in the first person, it is moving beyond anything I have the ability to describe.

As I read the book I was horrified, outraged, disbelieving, sad and discouraged. How could this happen? Our narrative of America as “the greatest nation on earth” does not hold up under this examination of a justice system blatantly racist and operated with impunity by people who do not believe they will be held accountable. Because they are not held accountable.

The recent explosion of cell phone videos showing police shooting unarmed black people is the tip of the iceberg. This has gone on for generations. The excessive use of force, the disregard for black lives, a criminal justice system where accountability is simply absent – that is the true narrative of this country.

I was floored by the details of the cases Bryan Stevenson worked on. Buoyed by the cases where he managed to finally get justice for people wrongly accused and incarcerated, and devastated by case after case of people he could not save. Innocent people are being executed by the state, which makes it murder. There is no justification for “mistakenly” taking the life of those wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. What is the penalty to the judge, jury and executioner for the wrongful death of an innocent person? Read More

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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.