“Golden Poppies”

Golden Poppies

Laila Ibrahim

Relationships are sometimes more complicated than we realize. Laila Ibrahim’s novel shows a family that consists of slavers and the enslaved in a post Civil War world. Their tangle of emotions, love, and devotion is at once amazing and confusing. How do we learn to navigate in a racist world, where some are thought to be less than others? If the characters didn’t discuss their ties to slavery, or fighting for liberty through women’s suffrage, you might think this a contemporary piece. “I desperately want to believe that the ugliness of the past is behind us. That we have moved past doubting that we can be one nation with liberties equally given.” (280) 

“Stamped From the Beginning”

Stamped from the Beginning

By Ibram X. Kendi

My thoughts on this book are complicated. But, as I read, I noted pieces that caught my attention, validated what I already knew, or challenged my thinking. Therefore, instead of a “typical” review, here are some of my abbreviated notes:

• “...minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies.” (33)

• Monogenesis = humans ONE species vs. Polygenesis = multiple origins of human species

• Christianity = more humble and better servants (74)

• Enlightenment = “reason, not religion should command human affairs.” (92)

• Benjamin Franklin - “racist ideas was essential to substantiating slavery.” (96)

• “...loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes…” (103)

• “Did (Thomas) Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?” (110)

• “...they only cared about Black capabilities to make them money.” (122)

• “New England’s industrial revolution...ran on the wheels of southern cotton.” (161)

• “It is only as they are free, educated, enlightened, that they become a nuisance.” (187)

• “When men oppress their fellowmen, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” - Frederick Douglass (199)

• “Like any racist, he dismissed the evidence that undermined his theory, and hardened his theory with evidence that supported it.” -William Lloyd Garrison (229)

• “...should they be carefully civilized or rigidly segregated from whites?” -Jim Crow (268)

• “If White people were racist and discriminated against Blacks, then Black people were to blame…” (294)

• D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation = motion picture(s)...newest visual media by which to circulate racist ideas. (306)

• “The highest aim of human existence is...the conservation of race.” -Adolph Hitler (311)

• “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all about it.” -Zora Neale Hurston (347)

• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King, Jr. (374)

• Kerner Commission, 1968 “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.” (404)

• “Those who have the power to abolish racial discrimination have not done so...and they will never be persuaded or educated to do so as long as racism benefits them in some way.” (509)

I am at once saddened at the similarities in thought to today's “divide” amongst people in the United States.

Blame.

Finger pointing.

“Found” justification.

Hate.

“My Notorious Life”

My Notorious Life

Kate Manning

Kate Manning’s novel caught me off guard. As I read, knowing I would write this review, I couldn’t quite figure out what the book was saying to me. But, as I continued to read I realized what it was and it feels pertinent to women today; women should always have the right to make decisions about their bodies, the right to choose. The novel, set in the 1860s, laid the historical groundwork for what would 100 years later become the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v Wade. This is NOT a novel for those who do not believe women should be able to choose how they deal with their reproductive health. The ending was a bit of a let down, I wanted the main character to take a stand and fight for the rights of women.