Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

Summary: A black history textbook wrapped up in a comedic wrapper. 

I am all about a good Black history book. And I also really appriciate history told by comedians because they are trying to get around the way that many people are resistant to dry dates and events presentations of history.

Black AF History is not a dry presentation. The humor mostly works to get to the heart of the presentation. I think some of the voice of his uncle sections fall a bit flat. But the vast majority works well.

I think one of the by products of the presenation is that this is not a universal Black presentation, but a particular black presentation. That should be obvious becuase there is no universal Black experience that is true of all Black peole at all times. Harriot grew up with a rural southern Black cultural experience. That experience will be differnet from an northern urban Black experience and different from a midwestern farmbelt experience and different from California suburban experience. And all of these are still stereotypical in some way which makes them also incomplete.

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W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America

W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America cover imageSummary: Short look at both the history of WEB Dubois 1900 World Fair project and how it predated much of the graphical data representation that became common later in the 20th century. 

This is not a long book. There are really only a handful of essays. Those essays give context to the 1900 Paris World Exposition, WEB DuBois and his experience up until this point, and the data that was being presented. A final section discusses how innovative the presentation of the data was and how it predated later similar graphical data presentations.

I have known about this book since it came out but just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I have an undergrad degree in sociology and part of an early job was using GIS demographics to help churches and church plants with planning. So I have a fair amount of background to know how important this event was in regard to data presentation.

But this matters in part because of what WEB DuBois and the others who participated were trying to do. 1900 was 35 years after the end of slavery. Contextually, 35 yeas ago was 1990, and the first Iraq War hadn’t happened yet. George HW Bush was president and the http protocol was being developed but the first real web browser would not be released widely until 1994. In other words, slavery was recent. It wasn’t just that slavery was recent but that there was widespread perception that Black Americans (and all from African decent) were “less than” those from European decent. The presentation, and WEB DuBois himself, were proof of the falsity of that belief.

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Blood at the Root: A Novel by LaDarrion Williams

Blood at the Root: A Novel by LaDarrion Williams cover imageSummary: An orphan who aged out of foster care breaks his (chosen, not biological) brother out of an abusive foster care family, and that starts his discovery of his magical roots, a family he didn’t know he had, and a magical HBCU. 

I have been trying to intentionally read more fiction this year. That has mostly been young adult fiction because it is what has drawn me in so far.

Blood At the Root was published last year and I have seen it on the shelves of a few friends on Goodreads or seen social media posts about it. As I try to generally do, I avoided reading anything about it other than seeing that people I trusted recommended it.

Malik is 17 and petitioned to be released from the foster care system. His mother died when he was seven and people around him, blamed him for her death. He doesn’t really understand what happened. But he knows it has to do with his magic. Since the day of her death, he has magic. But it is mostly uncontrolled and comes out when he is angry or emotional. So he tries to repress his emotions to stay in control. (He is not always in control.)

The book opens with Malik stealing a car so that he can break his (chosen, not biological) 12 year old foster brother out of an abusive foster home. They have grown up in a small predominately Black Alabama town and they dream of going to California to get away from everything. I won’t give away too much more than spoilers from opening chapters, but in the midst of running away, they run into trouble and that leads them to find Malik’s grandmother who he didn’t know he had. She and all those around her also have magic and Malik finds an underground world of magic and Black community which he is not sure he can trust. He has been on his own for 10 years without anyone watching out for him. And it is hard to trust that there could be family that is trustworthy if they had not come for him earlier.

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Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis by Mark Nation

Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Mark Nation cover imageSummary: An assessment of Bonhoeffer as a pacifist and how that pacifism remained unchanged throughout the 1940s, in opposition to how Bonhoeffer’s story is often presented. 

Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis is intentionally trying to reframe the story of Bonhoeffer. The common story is that Bonhoeffer after his time studying in NYC in 1930-31 came to see the Sermon on the Mount as the central teaching of Christianity. Bonhoeffer focused his teaching in the underground seminary on the Sermon on the Mount and that is reflected in his book Discipleship. But starting at some point in the late 1930s or early 1940s, there was a shift in Bonhoeffer and he came to see that his peace ethic was no longer a viable means of operating. This traditional version of Bonhoeffer shifts into a couple of variations, either Bonhoeffer kept his peace ethnic but violated his own teaching and particpated in the assassination attempt anyway, or he moved toward a type of Nebuhrian realism that justified his participation in the assassination attempt.

Mark Nation says that is all wrong. He directly challenges Bethge’s presenation of Bonhoeffer as changing and instead suggests that Bonhoeffer remained fully and conscously a pacifist until the end. The book is essentially a collection of six main essays about different aspects of why Nation thinks this reframing best makes sense of the evidence that we have and then four appendix essays.

The first essay is summarized by this quote: “Bonhoeffer, let it be said over and over, was not arrested for participating in any assassination attempts. He was arrested for helping to save the lives of fourteen Jews and was imprisoned for subverting the military’s power to conscript him into service.” Part of this discussion is about how Nation doesn’t think there is much, if any, evidence that Bonhoeffer did anything other that communicate with the ecumentical church that there was a movement in Germany trying to remove Hitler from power.

The second essay is about the importance of the “Jewish question”. It is nearly 40 pages and both points out how Bonheffer saw the the problem of overt antisemitism, but how Bonhoeffer was still supersessionist in his treatment of the question and how Bonhoeffer’s method was primarily to talk about the ability of Jewish Christians to be part of the church. Nation suggests that this was at least in part a strategy to get the church to recognize that if Jewish people are unable to be recognized within the church then the very concept of evangelism and the universality of the church was at stake. Germany was only about 1% Jewish and of those about 1 in 6 ethnically Jewish people were Christians.

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The Anti-Greed Gospel by Malcolm Foley

The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money Is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward cover imageSummary: A reframing of the concept of racism, not as hatred on the basis of skin color, but as greed. 

Racial capitalism is a concept that I have been aware of, but not dived deeply into. I read part of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran but put it aside when I had some other pressing things and never came back to it. I think, in part, I set it aside because I needed to grapple with some other things first. I have followed Malcolm Foley on social media (and his podcast) for a while. I have observed him from a distance coming across the concept of racial capitalism and how that shifted some of his language around racism. I pre-ordered The Anti-Greed Gospel a while ago precisely because I thought he could introduce the topic in a way that I could understand.

About a week before the book was released, Netgalley emailed and offered me an advance digital copy for review. The Anti-Greed Gospel fairly short. I read a chapter or so before bed and finished it in five days. (There are 8 chapters and the main text is about 165 pages. I had 55 highlights in my copy which you can see here.)

As I was reading I kept thinking that in some ways Critical Race Theory is centering how legal structures were the primary tool of racism while Racial Capitalism centered out greed and capitalism were the primary tool of racism. But that is both too simple and not nuanced enough. It is pretty well known that legal structures were essential to creating the concept of race. Race as we understand the modern category did not exist before the enlightenment when categorization became a mainstream tool of not just science, but also of economics and other areas of academics and culture. That is, of course, not to say that no one recognized that there were different skin colors, but to say that phenotypical skin color was not determinative of worth, value or identity in the way that scientific racism developed from the 18th to the 20th century.

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Wondla Trilogy by Tony DiTerlizzi

Summary: Twelve year old Eva has grown up in an underground shelter, all alone with just a robot who has cared for her from birth. When the shelter is breached, Eva confronts a world unlike anything she could have imagined.

Young adult fiction is a comfort food of books, but I have not kept my finger on new books coming out, so I am frequently finding books that are new to me, but not new books. I stumbled on Wondla because it is a cartoon series on Apple TV+. I hadn’t seen anything about it before I stumbled one it, but I was looking for something that that I could watch with my kids and my teenage nieces. My kids are starting to get old enough to be able to watch things that have some tension in them.

We binged six of the seven episodes in a weekend and then watched the last a few days later. Season one of the TV series is the first book of the trilogy. And presumably the second season (which is coming but doesn’t have a release date) will be the second book. In print, each of the books is roughly 450 pages. I read all three in less than 2 weeks. The first I read as an ebook from Kindle Unlimited, the next two I was able to check out from our local library in print. The Kindle editions were fine, but the print has great art in color that does not come out as well in a black and white kindle file.

A rough rule of thumb is that the intended audience of a book is the same approximate age as the main protagonist. In this case, Eva is 12 and she turns 13 in the context of the story. The cartoon has moved Eva to 16 years old and that shifts the cartoon story just a bit. In many ways, I think 12-13 is the better target. While Eva is very mature for her age, shifting her to 16 changes the story a bit for the 2nd and 3rd books. I haven’t seen the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the show, but my guess is that there will be a bit of a romance in them, which doesn’t make sense for a 12 year old. But more importantly the younger age makes more sense of Rovender Kitt (Rovee), the wise Alien who finds Eva and teaches her about the forest and becomes a father figure to her. It is not that older teens do not also need father figures, but I think the connection and the dependence works better with the younger age.

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Epiphany: The Season of Glory by Fleming Rutledge

Summary: An exploration of the season of Epiphany, a celebration of the glory of Christ’s incarnation and revelation of himself to us.

I appreciate this book while also being a bit frustrated with it and I am not completely sure why. I started it last year during the Epiphany season and didn’t finish it. So I started it again right at the end of Christmas season so that I would have it done by the start of Epiphany. But again I didn’t finish and I really forced myself to finish. I have previously read Rutledge’s book on Advent, which is mostly a collection of sermons. And I read about 75% of Rutledge’s’ Crucifixion and I have dipped into several other of her sermon collections, but again, never finished them.

Sermon collections are not something that really are intended to read straight through. So dipping into them but not finishing is I think to be expected for the genre. But there is something else that I think feels off here. I very much appreciate Rutledge’s wisdom and attention to the tradition of the Episcopal church. She turns 87 later this year and we need to pay attention to elders who have seen changes in history. I also think that she is one of the best preachers I have ever heard. I have spent a lot of time watching her old sermons on youtube.

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King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Summary: The first definitive style biography of King in nearly 40 years. 

At the end of the audiobook is an interview with Jonathan Eig and Lerone A. Martin, author of The Gospel of J Edgar Hoover. Their discussion about the lack of full biographies and the new sources is compelling. I had not realized that it has been over 40 years since Stephen Oates biography and nearly 40 years since Garrow’s biography. Because I have read more recent books like The Seminarian and the The Sword and the Shield (joint biography of King and Malcolm X) as well as a number of histories were King played a major role in just didn’t realize until I heard that interview how long it had been since a full biography.

Also detailed in that interview is new sources have been found or released. Eig is a journalist by training and history. You can tell that in his writing, but we are at that transition period when the Civil Rights generation is passing away. Eig says he was able to interview over 200 people who knew King. Some like Juanita Abernathy knew King well and were known figures. But Eig also interviewed minor figures, like his barber in Montgomery.

I am letting that interview at the end frame some of my thinking about the book, but it was clear from the start of the biography that Eig was trying to portray King as a flawed man. Similar to Alter’s framing of Jimmy Carter, Eig has significant respect for King as a subject, but to write well about the whole man we do need to understand his weaknesses. I am going to talk more below about how he handles those weaknesses, but in that interview he said he wanted to keep King from being reduced and simplified.

One last point from the interview is that one of the significant sources that is fairly new are FBI files. Not all files have been declassified yet, but some have. Another set was declassified after the book was released. And another large set it scheduled to be released in 2027. Eig has no doubt about King’s involvement in extramarital affairs. But he balances that with a more clear understanding of how J Edgar Hoover and the FBI as a whole were not just observers of affairs, but significant opponents of not just the civil rights movement in general but King in particular. The antagonism of the FBI and Hoover in particular was a significant part of how the shift in attitude toward both King and the civil rights movement. It was not just the point when King voiced opposition to the Vietnam war, but throughout the whole movement the FBI was acting as a propaganda machine against the civil rights movement, not just with the public but especially in harming the relationship that King had with the President and the Department of Justice. The affairs were one excuse, but not the first excuse or the main excuse for why the civil rights movement and King in particular were dangerous. The very next day after the 1963 March on Washington, the FBI puts out a memo labeling King as the greatest threat to American democracy. Hoover, as detailed in Lerone Martin’s book was a Christian Nationalist with strong views of white racial superiority. He both viewed the civil rights movement as a communist plant or distraction, but also a violation of the natural order.

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The Book of Hours: A Novel by Davis Bunn

The Book of Hours: A Novel by Davis Bunn cover imageSummary: A widower inherits a British estate, but he may lose it before he is even unpacked. 

I am trying to read more fiction. This is a goal that I have almost every year. I really am conviced that fiction is important, but I have a tendancy to gravitate toward “important” books. I saw that the Book of Hours was on sale and I picked it up. I read his book The Maestro when I was in high school and I enjoyed it. It was a book about a musician who was a real artist and as he came to faith he saw he could incorporate his faith and art. I real a lot of Christian novels as a teen and I have read very few past my teen years because so few felt worthwhile.

As I read The Book of Hours I couldn’t help but think about it as a novel version of a Hallmark movie. I enjoy a Hallmark movie very now and then, but I don’t really confused it for great art. It is fluff and fluff every now and then if fine. As much as can enjoy some fluff here and there, I do think that Karen Swallow Prior’s critique of Christians as overly attached to Victorian values, and mistake those Victorian values for Christian ones fits here. This is a sentimental novel that deserves the critique that Prior has for senatamental novels. But it also fits all of the standard Hallmark tropes. A widower from out of town inherits an estate. He is penniless and finds the estate is going to soon be sold for back taxes. He meets the town’s young (single) doctor who immediately hates him for not caring about the property and allowing it to fall into disrepair. There is a greedy developer to provide some tension.

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The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix Cover imageSummary: A graphic novel biography of Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship.

This is the fifth book I have read by John Hendrix. I have written about his biographies of John Brown and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This is more like the biography of Bonhoeffer than John Brown. The biography of John Brown was about 40 pages and more similar to Hendrix’s books about Jesus in that length and format. The longer biographies, this one and the Bonhoeffer one, are a combination of text and graphics. It is not unusually for there to be 200 words on a page. Some pages are predominately graphics, especially the sections where a lion and a wizard are narrating the story. But there are long sections that are more text heavy.

And when you think about these as graphic novels, you should think about a graphic novel as a format, not an age target. These are readable for late teens, but they are not children’s books. There are long sections about the academic meaning of myth, or how stories communicate truth. I have seen a couple of reviews that thought those longer sections were not as helpful, but I can see their point. This isn’t a biography of the two men as much as it is a biography of the conversation that Tolkien and Lewis and another friend had about viewing Christianity as “true myth” that helped Lewis overcome his objections to Christianity.

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