Required Reading for White Americans

As of this writing, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has not stepped down (after admitting he has previously worn blackface), but he has promised to rehabilitate his career with a renewed focus on racial equity. Also, he has a reading assignment! Reportedly, Northam is reading Alex Haley’s “Roots” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.”

Why stop there?

I have some additional book ideas for Northam – and anyone else who wants to better understand our American legacy of slavery, botched reconciliation, and segregation. I heartily recommend the following (in no particular order):

Nonfiction

1. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips
2. We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
4. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry
5. The Half That Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist
6. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington
7. A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools by Rachel Devlin
8. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo
9. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
10. The Groveland Four: The Sad Story of a Legal Lynching by Gary Corsair
11. Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle by Kristen Green
12. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
13. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
14. Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America by Beryl Satter
15. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America by Ira Katznelson
16. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

Prefer a novel? Try these:

1. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
2. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
3. Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
4. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison (truly, anything by Toni Morrison)
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Have you read any of the above?  What else should be on this list?

 

The Secrets of My Graduate School Yearbook

Given the dumpster fire that is Virginia politics these days, after the revelation of horribly racist photos that may or may not show Governor Ralph Northam, some are asking: Would any of us really want our graduate school yearbooks flung open for all to see? Who among us could possibly be fit for public office if the misdeeds of our youth were revealed in black and white?

I dug up my old Harvard Business School yearbook to see what secrets lay within. Are members of the HBS Class of ’97 hiding awful secrets? What would happen to the prominent careers and reputations of my classmates today if these photos were made public?

There are, in fact, some very embarrassing photos in that yearbook – I can’t deny it. If they ever get out, here’s what the world would see:

• People drinking beer
• People drinking beer DIRECTLY OUT OF THE CAN (and it was Budweiser!!!)
• Classroom photos of eager students raising their hands with an ivy-league amount assertiveness and confidence
• One guy with a big heart-shaped tattoo on his arm (but upon closer inspection, the tattoo isn’t real – it was drawn with a Sharpie)
• Someone at a party wearing a plastic Viking hat with horns (cultural appropriation, for sure)
• Drinks, drinks, and more drinks – alcohol was featured prominently, though not quite so much as in Brett Kavanaugh’s high school (!) yearbook
• Grinning future-one-percenters wearing tuxedos while unlit cigars dangle from their lips (I do NOT remember this many parties – I must have been in the library)

That’s about the worst of it. Mainly, the yearbook is full of wholesome scenes of the Harvard milieu straight out of central casting (Harvard-Yale game celebrations, crew teams sculling on the Charles River, preppy young men frolicking on a perfectly manicured lawn with a football, etc.). Perhaps these simply reflect the editorial choices of a school community with lots to hide. But I don’t think so.

You know what isn’t in my yearbook? A single picture of people in blackface or Klan hoods. Any one of my classmates could proudly serve in public office – some probably are – without worrying about past yearbook photos.

I guess that’s one difference between Harvard Business School and Eastern Virginia Medical School. Another is that our curriculum included Human Resources Management. If I were Northam’s boss, I’d be drafting an email with this handy, all-purpose language:

“Effective immediately, Ralph Northam has chosen to pursue other opportunities. We wish him well in his future endeavors.”