The Mookse and the Gripes discussion
This topic is about
The Trees
Booker Prize for Fiction
>
2022 Booker Shortlist - The Trees
WndyJW wrote: "I wonder if a white author has standing to write a humorous book about KKK and lynching...."This reminds me of some of my thoughts while reading Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson, a story of a lynching-reenactment gone wrong, where the victim is Asian American, the protagonist is his white friend, and the author is Black. As I read it I often thought about how the author's Blackness shaped my (anyone's?) interpretation of the story, much like what happened when I was reading Erasure by Percival Everett. I feel it less with The Trees--I think the satire is broad enough that a non-Black author could have written it.
WndyJW wrote: "Thanks, Linda. I know that everyone is horrified and heartbroken by the history of lynching in the US, so I hope I didn’t sound holier than thou when I said I felt uncomfortable reading a humorous ..."I have to say that I did not read or react to The Trees in this way at all. I thought that the way Everett wrote about the KKK was scathing and completely and totally humiliating. He portrayed them as incredibly stupid, self-centered, ignorant, hapless, incompetent and generally incapable of anything. I felt his hatred for them in every word. The fact that they are buffoons is funny, of course, but the underlying hatred was completely clear to me.
It's fascinating that your assumption is that the humour is there to help white readers find the subject matter more palatable, I'm about half way through and mine is more or less the opposite - that the humour deliberately presents an ethical dilemma for the reader. Creating humour out of disturbing subject matter is a great way to force a reader or audience into self-reflection about how they're responding to the content. Those exact questions (is it okay for this to be made funny? Is it okay for me to laugh?) are ones which really force you to think carefully about both the subject matter itself, which is obviously horrific, and the ethics of representing it.It's also interesting that you're assuming the humour is in there specifically for white readers, has Everett specified that somewhere? I'm not sure I had automatically assumed that the target audience for this novel is white, though clearly there's a lot in there designed to directly challenge white readers.
None of this is to say that your assumptions are wrong, of course and you're certainly not 'holier than thou' for your response, it's an entirely understandable one which would just never have occurred to me
Rose Annable wrote: " Those exact questions (is it okay for this to be made funny? Is it okay for me to laugh?) are ones which really force you to think carefully about both the subject matter itself, which is obviously horrific, and the ethics of representing it...."Yes. This sums up the way the humor added greatly to my discomfort and gave me no choice but to confront the horrific subject matter in a new less jaundiced way.
This reminds me of some of my thoughts while reading Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson, a story of a lynching-reenactment gone wrong, where the victim is Asian American, the protagonist is his white friend, and the author is Black. As I read it I often thought about how the author's Blackness shaped my (anyone's?) interpretation of the story, much like what happened when I was reading Erasure by Percival Everett. I feel it less with The Trees--I think the satire is broad enough that a non-Black author could have written it. "I think this is really important when it comes to how we respond to the humour in there. I (neither Black nor American) have always been accustomed to discussing and reading about racism in a particular tone, one that's very careful and very respectful, as is entirely proper when it comes to talking about anything of which you have no first hand experience. However when you become so accustomed to an issue being dealt with in a certain manner it can be a shock to the system when it's treated completely differently, and it does start you thinking about what is 'acceptable' when it comes to both representation and response. Is it ok to write in this way? Is it ok to laugh? Is it ok to, as a white British woman question how a Black American man chooses to grapple with the legacy of such horrific acts? To presume to know the most respectful or appropriate way to deal with them?
Due to my MA dissertation being due alarmingly soon I've only just gotten started on the longlist, and though I'm sure there will be more overtly original or experimental (both words which seem to get thrown around here a lot) novels on the list, I'm seriously impressed with this so far. Though it may not seem the most 'literary' (another word thrown around a lot, which I feel needs to come with an explicit definition each time!), I think there's a lot to be said for its apparent simplicity. It may be a lot less flashy than some novels, but it's prompting a lot of very interesting responses (in me, at least), not just about the subject matter itself, but about the responsibilities of dealing with such subject matter in art
Cindy wrote: "WndyJW wrote: "Thanks, Linda. I know that everyone is horrified and heartbroken by the history of lynching in the US, so I hope I didn’t sound holier than thou when I said I felt uncomfortable read..."I did love how moronic the KKK guys were. I can imagine Everett enjoyed writing those descriptions, it’s clear Everett had no love for the KKK or the racists in the town. And that we’re discussing this book and the history of lynching is a good thing, so Everett did get the conversation started.
I would compare this book to the movie Jojo Rabbit, in which we laughed at young Jojo’s imaginary friend Hitler, laughed at the Nazis occupying a German town, laughed at a young German’s boy’s hero worship of Hitler and the SS.
I can see the positives in mocking oppressors and murderers, we diminish them by laughing at them, but I also wonder if it diminishes the horror of what they did when we laugh at them. I’m not saying it does, these are just the questions I’m wrestling with.
Still timely unfortunately.
It most certainly is David.
the comparison with Jojo Rabbit feels apt and yet I did not forgive the premise of the film and couldnt watch it.
I read that Emmett Till’s uncle, at his own risk, testified in court that he heard a woman’s voice in the truck identify Emmett when the killers dragged him out of the house. I did watch Jojo Rabbit, although I understand your feelings about it, Lark. Many agree with you. Waititi did much the same thing Everett did: Young Jojo didn’t understand that the Nazis were bad and he hated Jews, but he befriended the Jewish girl his mother was hiding so learned that he was wrong about Jewish people. Tragically he has much more painful lessons before the movie is over.
In the end, I felt that in the movie, as in The Trees, the material was not handled in a disrespectful manner, but there is always the discomfort at laughing at any of it and I think that discomfort is part of the point.
Trump allowed bigots to celebrate their bigotry, the Republicans are rewriting history books, and 2/3 of Millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is (my millennials do!) so there needs to be more novels and more movies about black history in the US and the Holocaust. Maybe Everett and Waititi understand people won’t watch or read anything too painful and serious, and a little humor makes it easier.
What I found humorous was not the KKK guys - they were just plain stupid and part of the nicely done satire. The humor for me was in the way the two Black agents of the MIB responded to inquiries and handled the blatantly racist folks they were dealing with. They were more intelligent, better educated, and more courteous than the white folks of Money, Mississippi. I did not perceive that as kowtowing to white readers.
I didn’t mean to imply that Everett intentionally wrote The Trees for a white audience and tried to make it easy for white readers. My statement was simply that there is some value in making a book about an ugly side of America palatable to a white audience that otherwise wouldn’t read it. Those of us in this group don’t need handholding when confronting difficult topics, but there are white people who get defensive about any discussion of race.I used The Help as an example because it was so well received they made it into a movie. My black friends that read it said they liked it, but found it silly and said if a book like the book in The Help had come out black churches would have been burned. So it while it’s good that so many white readers were made aware of the issues faced by domestic help, it was a sugarcoated story.
Reading that the corpse of Emmett Till was found with the first murder victim had no impact on me, however, I had a visceral reaction to watching the 5 minute YouTube video of Emmett’s mother meeting Emmett’s body at the Chicago train station almost 70 yrs ago. My heart was racing and I cried.
Readers who don’t want to confront the agony of grief Mamie Till and Emmett’s family endured aren’t likely to read a serious novel or nonfiction account of his murder, but they could read The Trees and learn that there are 4000 lynchings for which there has never been an arrest, much less a conviction. That they would learn about the lynchings and see it compared to the ongoing lynchings of black boys and men, girls and women, is a good thing.
I understood what you meant Wendy, and I don't think 'kowtowing' is an appropriate descriptor. Although I assume Linda you didn't mean your comment to sound quite so dismissive of Wendy's perspective? It's interesting that the focus in the discussion seems to be on Black versus white Americans? The cover, and reviews I've read, suggest the novel also indirectly addresses anti-Semitism, racism and lynching of Chinese labourers etc One thing - and I'm likely to say this in an annoying way - that I think divides American from British perspectives on race is that here ideas about the workings of racism seem to be broader in terms of considering how it impacts/operates across different groupings and communities. And many Black writers on racism include Brown, Jewish and other groups within their discussions - and vice-versa. Currently growing racism towards/attacks on East Asians is a huge issue.
My other observation which, admittedly, is based on extracts and reviews is that the book does seem to be working within/reworking a very specific genre tradition. A particular form of satirical noir popularised by writers like Carl Hiaasen who's deployed similar techniques to critique corruption and anti-environmental activities in Florida. It can be a very effective strategy but humour is also very personal, what one person finds works, another doesn't. So it can also backfire.
So, I imagine that for everybody who read this and finds the satire works, there will also be others who are less convinced by this type of portrayal of, what is, still a very dangerous grouping within American society, and find that framing problematic or distancing. It seems to me that both responses are valid since there's an inevitable difference between an implied reader and an actual one.
It did include the murders of a warehouse of men with Asian corpses found at the scene, and Native American, and I think a gay man (I have to read that section again,) but they weren’t the bulk of the novel.I can see how the satire worked for some, but I tend to be too serious about everything (my mother often finds me exhausting.) I do think that there is a risk in making some people risable, like the casual racists, for instance, or (view spoiler) rather than loathsome. The KKK are a vicious, violent, hate motivated group that is still operating; it’s hard to see someone as a serious threat while laughing at them.
I am sure Everett enjoyed mocking the KKK and we all enjoyed laughing at the slack jawed yokels, but those characters weren’t just clowns, they were racist killers who got away with it and put on their robes to burn a cross in the black part of town.
I realize I’m alone in making the humor an issue, but this isn’t a book we read as a group read, The Trees has been nominated for The Booker, so the standards, in theory, are higher. It will reach a wider audience and what is the message? Nothing in this novel moved me. I’ll point to Jojo Rabbit again where we had to ask ourselves if we should be laughing, at least in that film there were tears as well as laughter. The Trees uses the hypocrisy of racism, bigoted buffoons, and a zombie army to get laughs, but what in the book made anyone stop, struck with the real horror and pain of what we are dealing with? Where was the dead mother in town square that broke our hearts?
Wendy, I 100% understand what you are saying, but I don't think that's what The Trees is about. As others have described it, it's a revenge fantasy. I don't think we're supposed to have broken hearts. I think that's a given. We're supposed to have anger, we're supposed to be surprisingly morally ambivalent about the murders, we're supposed to be unsure who to root for. I don't think it was about getting laughs (it certainly was not about that for me). It was about "an eye for an eye."
I think from his interviews Everett had white readers in mind at least in terms of some aspects of the book, he's spoken about being interested to see if readers would fix on the aspects of the book dealing with the South. As he saw the book as an American book not a Southern American one, but he thought that there was a sense in which Americans who are outside the South or don't identify with the South, prefer to think of lynching as a Southern activity, as a way of avoiding self-examination/being implicated in this kind of violence. And he's mentioned that this, in some sense, was confirmed by at least one major review who called it a Southern novel rather than an American one. He's also talked in the past about checking where his books are shelved and not being keen on them being placed in sections labelled 'African-American' or 'African-American writers'. I noticed also Wendy that the book has been compared to Tarentino's 'Inglorious Bastards' and Everett has mentioned an interest in Tarentino's work - and I find Tarentino doesn't work for me - so can see how something in a similar vein might not work for you.
I think we’re in danger of making too much of the humor, and even the novel as satire. It has those things; it is not those things. For instance there is nothing funny or satirizing about chapter 102, which is, in its entirety:Florence, South Carolina. Macon, Georgia. Hope Mills, North Carolina. Selma, Alabama. Shelbyville, Tennessee. Blue Ash, Ohio. Bedford, Indiana. Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Irmo, South Carolina. Orangeburg, South Carolina. Los Angeles, California. Jackson, Mississippi. Benton, Arkansas. Lexington, Nebraska. New York, New York. Rolla, Missouri. Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Elsmere, Delaware. Tarrytown, New York. Grafton, North Dakota. Oxford, Pennsylvania. Anne Arundel, Maryland. Otero, Colorado. Coos Bay, Oregon. Chester, South Carolina. Petersburg, Virginia. Laurel, Delaware. Madison, Maryland. Beckley, West Virginia. Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee. Fort Mill, South Carolina. Niceville, Florida. Slidell, Louisiana. Money, Mississippi. DeSoto, Mississippi. Quitman, Mississippi. Elmore, Alabama. Jefferson, Alabama. Montgomery, Alabama. Henry, Alabama. Colbert, Alabama. Russell, Alabama. Coffee, Alabama. Clarke, Alabama. Laurens, South Carolina. Greenwood, South Carolina. Oconee, South Carolina. Union, South Carolina. Aiken, South Carolina. York, South Carolina. Abbeville, South Carolina. Hampton, South Carolina. Franklin, Mississippi. Lowndes, Mississippi. Leflore, Mississippi. Simpson, Mississippi. Jefferson, Mississippi. Washington, Mississippi. George, Mississippi. Monroe, Mississippi. Humphreys, Mississippi. Bolivar, Mississippi. Sunflower, Mississippi. Hinds, Mississippi. Newton, Mississippi. Copiah, Mississippi. Alcorn, Mississippi. Jefferson Davis, Mississippi. Panola, Mississippi. Clay, Mississippi. Lamar, Mississippi. Yazoo, Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi.
Maybe it’s partly that I was raised and have lived practically my entire life in the American South but those pages took me to my knees.
Cindy wrote: "Wendy, I 100% understand what you are saying, but I don't think that's what The Trees is about. As others have described it, it's a revenge fantasy. I don't think we're supposed to have broken hear..."But is that necessarily the case? Everett's talked about not expecting or trying to predict how particular readers will respond to his work, and being interested in seeing how readers respond. He comes from an academic background in which that kind of blanket notion of the author directing the ultimate meaning is quite a suspect one. In which case there's no 'supposed to' possible.
Lee wrote: "I think we’re in danger of making too much of the humor, and even the novel as satire. It has those things; it is not those things. For instance there is nothing funny or satirizing about chapter 1..."Great point Lee.
I’m one of those who described it as a revenge fantasy and in another context I wouldn’t be thinking this deeply about it. I liked it, I thought it was funny, but since we’re discussing/debating which books should go on to a shortlist these are the things bouncing around in my head.I can see what you’re saying, Cindy, that the reader being “surprisingly morally ambivalent about the murders” might be the message. Is an eye for an eye ever okay? In theory civilized people would say no, but in these maddeningly unjust cases we are all cheering the vigilante justice.
If they had a category for book that initiated the most discussion The Trees would win that!
I don’t have much to add but I think the humor is what allows the book to breathe so that the punches, when they come, bring the reader to their knees.It’s not just you, Lee, that had that reaction.
I think Everett failed in making this an American book rather than a southern book. The murders in the north were covered in the book, but all the characters that caught our attention were from Mississippi, so it felt very much like a southern story, at least to me.I’ll stop now. I don’t want to grind the book under my heel and ruin it for everyone that liked it, including myself! I did like it, just not enough to want to see it on the shortlist.
I’m going to read my other Everett books now to get a better sense of his writing.
Alwynne wrote: "I understood what you meant Wendy, and I don't think 'kowtowing' is an appropriate descriptor. Although I assume Linda you didn't mean your comment to sound quite so dismissive of Wendy's perspecti..."Certainly not dismissive of anyone's perspective as they all cause me to think more about the novel. It is being responded to with more differences and perhaps more emotion than many other books on the longlist. That I think is positive, as is the discussion those differences generate. I did not think Wendy's meant kowtowing in her comments but I used the expression because it was extreme. I think the author did not try to make this easy for white people to read. As someone noted in either early in this discussion or in a review, he knew he was being unfair in making caricatures of the white southerners but did it anyway because, after all, they needed a turn at being unfairly and wrongly humiliated.
Obviously I can't know how white, or some white people, will feel, since I'm not. But if there's a focus on reading it as primarily about white people in the South - and they also seem to be predominantly working-class - there does seem to be a way in which some white readers who are not from the South and/or not working-class could decide it's something that's other to them. Something other white people are implicated in but not them. In which case the comfort level might vary? I was interested to hear in one of his interviews that the most segregated cities in America now are actually in the North. So Wendy's point about the book failing to make the case that it's about white Americans seems significant.
Although from what I've read it seems Everett wouldn't necessarily regard that so much as a failure as see it as an interesting response.
I just realised that my new near neighbour (who has recently rented a house opposite me) travelled to Mississippi a month ago to report on the case https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...
Alwynne wrote: "Obviously I can't know how white, or some white people, will feel, since I'm not. But if there's a focus on reading it as primarily about white people in the South - and they also seem to be predom..."I definitely think there's a risk of this happening. The white Southern American characters fit into a very particular stereotype, and I do think there will be a temptation, or even a natural instinct, from certain white readers to other those characters. "They're a different type of white person to me". I suspect there will be a subsection of white readers who will just stop there - they'll enjoy the send up which reinforces a certain stereotype about white racist Trump supporters, but won't take the extra time to think about how they are implicated in the actions of white people in the book. In fact, given this is a novel which is seriously unlikely to be read by that type of person (I assume lol), I would imagine the main white readership of this will be left wing liberals who like to think of themselves as anti-racist allies, and I'm sure there will be a percentage of them who will just appreciate the opportunity to laugh some more at a group of people they already like to laugh at, and won't necessarily acknowledge that they are also being implicated. I'm not sure whether this is a failing - and clearly the KKK characters are meant to be laughable - but I suspect it will happen. I wonder whether Everett would see the joke as being on those white readers? He must have known that was a possibility when he chose to write the novel in the way he did.
Also Wendy I certainly don't think you're ruining the book for anyone by holding a different perspective, if anything you're enhancing my experience of it as I finish it.
Thanks Rose that's exactly it. And when Everett's talked about certain white readers likely to strive to avoid self-examination, I think that's what he's getting at, whereas he seems to see this tendency to racial violence as an American problem, full stop, not just something embedded in a particular American tradition/history. And when I think about George Floyd and the masses of Black Americans on Death Row etc I tend to think of these events as an extension of lynching. The last just happens to be state-sanctioned.
Murdering cops and white men not convicted of murdering a black man or boy or sexually assaulting black women are an extension of lynching.
I think your comment could be read two very different ways Wendy.
Do I need commas? White men not convicted is not white men. I’m listening to a streaming presentation on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion as I type this.
There is a running Chat during training and I’ve seen, “we are all HIS children,” “I want to see some Middle Eastern Christians in these videos,” “Removing the Lord from the workplace was the first mistake.” Diversity trainings are a nice idea, but the only things that changes the heart of bigots is knowing the “other.”
Rose Annable wrote: "I would imagine the main white readership of this will be left wing liberals who like to think of themselves as anti-racist allies, and I'm sure there will be a percentage of them who will just appreciate the opportunity to laugh some more at a group of people they already like to laugh at, and won't necessarily acknowledge that they are also being implicated"Undoubtedly true. I think a reader's response will always exist along a spectrum. I would like to think most of us reading this will also feel implicated, although whether that translates to concrete action is hard to say.
There's a risk in expecting a book like this to do too much.
Alwynne wrote: "And when I think about George Floyd and the masses of Black Americans on Death Row etc I tend to think of these events as an extension of lynching. The last just happens to be state-sanctioned."Agree. There's a lot to be said for the view that vigilante lynching at the hands of a mob has decreased in visibility over the last half century precisely because it has been co-opted by the state.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer wrote: "I just realised that my new near neighbour (who has recently rented a house opposite me) travelled to Mississippi a month ago to report on the case https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti......"
Your neighbor has likely spent more time in Mississippi than I have.
I suppose it's good to see The Daily Fail cover the issue, not a newspaper known for its sensitivity towards issues related to race and racism!
Here's the thing for me. I don't think I'm racist, but it is only recently that I've become sensitive to microaggressions and am sure I've said my share of them with no sense of what they were. I think those are the inherent bias that results from growing up in a culture and educational system dominated by white men. How to teach oneself (or anyone) to become aware of inherent bias though is not easy. I am currently read a book about the Tulsa Oklahoma massacre of 1921, which I am ashamed that I knew nothing about until I read about it in, of all places, a Dennis Lehane novel about five years ago. How could I have had history in school for 12 years straight and not have heard about that? I watched (on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite) white Southern cops kick pregnant Black women in the stomach during the 1960 civil rights marches and thought - how could anyone do that? I was so much younger then. I am rambling. But I am glad this book could be written, could be published, and could be longlisted for the Booker (and hopefully for the NBA). In this book it is the Black characters who are smart and witty and the white characters who are ignorant and clueless. I can appreciate that and I can appreciate the anger, the horror, and sadness that those lists of cities and, especially, those names invoke. Maybe someday there will be no place/need for such a book. I chuckled at the quips made by the Black agents, believing they made them, in part, to lighten the burden of having to listen to those white people.
This has been a wonderful discussion - thanks everyone for the contributions
Yes this is a great discussion, a tribute both to this group and to the book (and indeed to the judges for including it).
I think a number of white adults learned about the Tulsa massacre only recently, Linda, because it isn’t taught in school or ever really talked about. I read an article somewhere a few years ago about the generational wealth lost in the riot. For those not in the US there was an area near Tulsa known as Black Wall Street because it was a thriving neighborhood with a number of prosperous black businesses. There were beautiful homes, schools, culture. In the 1920s white men attacked and burned it all to the ground. There is a history of breaking up prosperous black business areas either by violence or through eminent domain.
Mississippi had its first integrated prom sometime around 2010. The high school was integrated, but until about 10-15 yrs ago there was a white prom and a black prom. Some white parents used their own money to provide a white prom for families that didn’t like the interracial prom. Mississippi still scares me.
I learnt about it from the 2020 Women’s Prize shortlist - Read At The Bone by Jacqueline Wilson which explores the massacre’s generational repercussions and also (cleverly I think links the plane attacks involved to 9/11). The ideas were I felt better than the writing
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Some quotes
Listen. Those Tulsa white folks burned my grandmama’s beauty shop to the ground! They burned up the school my mama would have gone to and her daddy’s restaurant. They nearly burned my own mama, who carried a heart-shaped scar on the side of her face till the day they laid her in the ground. Imagine them trying to set a two-year-old child on fire. That’s all my mama was—just two years old and barely running when the fire rained down on her. Her own daddy snatching her up, but not before that piece of wood from her mama’s beauty parlor landed on her cheek and left its memory there all her life. Two years old. Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included. Every last one. That was 1921. History tries to call it a riot, but it was a massacre. Those white men brought in their warplanes and dropped bombs on my mama’s neighborhood. God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story.
Those white folks came with their torches and their rages. … . Turned my people’s lives and dreams to ash. So my mama taught me all I know about holding on to what’s yours. I know you hold on to your dreams and you hold on to your money. And I know that paper money burns, so you put it into rolls of quarters and nickels and dimes. And when those grow to be too many, you find the men who sell you the blocks of gold. And you take those blocks of gold and stack them beneath your floorboards and way up high in your cabinets.
WndyJW wrote: "I think a number of white adults learned about the Tulsa massacre only recently, Linda, because it isn’t taught in school or ever really talked about. I read an article somewhere a few years ago ab..."It's still an issue. My daughter, at 12, was taught so little about Black history in public school. There are discussions of racism and Black history for ONE day a year, and I live in the Northeast. Last year I homeschooled her, and in part used a US history curriculum called Woke Homeschooling, which covered racial issues, as well as that Black history, and I'm ashamed to say I learned almost as much as she did.
(What gets me now is that schools are trying to implement change, but the backlash against CRT is astonishing. For those not familiar, Critical Race Theory is a way of addressing the racist history, and how it affects the country today. It's been banned in multiple states, the protestors don't want their kids feeling shame over the idea of whites as oppressors. When I homeschooled, I met many parents who'd pulled their kids from school because they felt the need to protect them from it...)
There's still so much hatred in this country.
I think this is one area where the internet has made a significant difference. Anyone who came of age with the internet (basically those under age 40) have a much broader knowledge of racism, including the Tulsa massacre.I've also noticed a generational gulf even among educated liberals in the US. Many people older than me still have the view that the US is largely a force for good in the world and systemic racism is a flaw in the system rather than the point of the system. Educated people younger than me are under little to no illusion that the country was founded on slavery and genocide and the system was built to maintain that order.
All this is anecdotal of course.
Grace, 14 yr old bi-racial granddaughter was one of only a few Black (does anyone know if it is grammatically respectful to capitalize the B when writing ‘black person’?) kids in her elementary school and said she hated when the teacher would bring up Martin Luther King in class because all the kids turned towards Grace. Once she reached middle school there were many more black kids so she has black friends and isn’t the black kid in class.It is up to parents in the US to teach their white kids about the history of race, institutional racism, hidden biases, etc., because, as Elizabeth said, the open hostility to any discussion of race (or LGBTQ issues or even LGBTQ families) is frightening.
Your observations align with mine, David. The younger generation gives me hope for the future. I think too though, that most Americans consider themselves, or strive to be anti-racist. It’s the vocal minority and the party in power that is so ugly. Which is not to say there isn’t still a lot of educating that needs to happen. Linda honestly and courageously said she knows she has hidden biases, we all do. Few of us really contemplate where we could improve.
I don’t feel so bad about only learning about the Tulsa massacred a few years ago, I had black co-workers that weren’t aware of it!
I think the current best practice is to capitalize Black but not white, although it's not necessarily a faux pas to write black in casual conversation. I'm not an expert so I'm certainly willing to be corrected if I've got it wrong.
WndyJW wrote: "Grace, 14 yr old bi-racial granddaughter was one of only a few Black (does anyone know if it is grammatically respectful to capitalize the B when writing ‘black person’?) kids in her elementary sch..."I usually use it for speaking about Black Americans but not always otherwise, these might help:
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
one thought I keep having while reading the comments here is that some of us wonder if such a genre-y book is worthy of a Booker. But this novel isn’t one written by a literary writer trying to write a genre book. It’s a literary writer using genre conventions as a literary technique to explore themes that no genre book ever would be interested in. That puts it in a different category for me, like a work of art that uses everyday objects like shoes or knitting needles or old photographs in a new context, to say something new.
David wrote: "I think this is one area where the internet has made a significant difference. Anyone who came of age with the internet (basically those under age 40) have a much broader knowledge of racism, inclu..."I think age can be too sweeping as a way of thinking about this, here I've met quite a few white people in their 70s upwards who were part of campaigning groups during the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the people who were active in movements like Rock Against Racism - hugely popular particularly among secondary school children in the 70s/early 80s - are now in their late fifties/early sixties upwards. As well as trade unionists, Labour Party members etc Although it should also be remembered that white people over a certain age had less access to education overall, less likely to be university educated than younger generations so less likely to have had access to wider sources of information. And of course we have a lot of people who aren't white who are pensioners now. Conversely a lot of young white people are quite right wing now too.
It may be just me but I think the age versus youth perspective, apart from reinforcing ageism, can play into the notion that history is linear and one of progress and each generation is therefore automatically more progressive than the last, which historically speaking is obviously not the case, otherwise we would not have swings back to the right, fuelled as much by the young as the old, as we are getting in many countries across Europe and elsewhere.
The generational perspective also raises the danger of lapsing into conservatism, and an accompanying Whig view of history - inevitable progress towards better things.
The Mookse and the Gripes
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Barbara Comyns (other topics)Hilary Mantel (other topics)
Helen DeWitt (other topics)
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I wonder if a white author has standing to write a humorous book about KKK and lynching.
There is something to be said for making difficult issues palatable for white audiences, like the feel good book with a white savior to address the humiliations and risks black domestic workers endured in The Help. It’s tragic that the terror of racism has to be sugar coated to reach a wide audience.