BOOK CLUB
For much of the past year, most of my Monday evenings have begun with a book club meeting. Like many people I know, as the nation descended into a spring and summer of racial reckoning in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a circle of my friends from childhood formed a book club to digest and process the concepts that we were reading about in books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
I’ve been close with this chosen family since my middle school and high school years, and our friendships span roughly 3 decades now. I’m quite proud of what each of them have accomplished in their lives: one teaches at Harvard Law School, one is neuroscientist and psychiatrist, another runs the theater and drama program at our old school, one is an anthropologist and paleobiologist, and another’s work focuses on family homelessness. Hearing each of their perspectives, informed from the vantage point of their adult expertise and experiences, has been illuminating and has sparked some quite heated and interesting discussions over the past months.
As much as everyone’s insight has provided interesting analysis and discussion about our readings, I think the most revelatory aspect of this book club has been observing how deeply seeded beliefs surrounding anti-racist discourse are. Discussing racism and bigotry is triggering stuff, indeed – it can so easily feel like a personal attack. Acknowledging that a belief or a statement is racist feels dangerously close to “being a racist”, which equates to being a “bad person”. The totality of that sense of villainization easily puts one on the defensive, makes it hard to be open and vulnerable enough in these discussions to acknowledge that one was simply previously ignorant of a perspective, and the feelings of humility surrounding that can be intense. Engaging in these group discussions with people I’ve been close to my entire life, who are almost like siblings, has only intensified the feelings of being triggered at various moments. Each of those instances has been a little epiphany in which I realize how deeply engrained some of my understandings are, stemming from the education we all received during a very formative time in our lives. With each of those revelations, I am keenly aware of how hard this work is, and I see more sharply the immensity of the work we have to do as a society to heal ourselves.
In those moments, I also see how lucky my friends and I were to be given the tools to think critically while we were still so young and have the foundation which gives us the confidence to be able to learn difficult lessons. I’m grateful for this circle of friendship that continues provide a safe space to grow and learn after so many chapters of life together.
In case you’re curious to know what we are reading at the moment, it turns out we aren’t reading at all – we’ve opted to listen to a podcast for this round of book club. We’re currently listening to and discussing the fourth season of Scene On Radio, The Land That Has Never Been Yet. It’s an excellent, compelling retelling of the history of the United States, told from perspectives that have either previously been ignored or marginalized. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested.
