books for your graduate

I have two high school seniors graduating this June. Here are four books I thought they should take with them when they leave for college:

GMorning, GNight!: little pep talks for me and you 

Lin-Manuel Miranda, author and creator of Hamilton, also writes the loveliest, most genuine, and life-affirming tweets. These nuggets are collected here in G'morning, G'night! with adorable illustrations by Jonny Sun, author of Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too.

“When the world is bringing you down, G'morning, G'night! will remind you that you are awesome.” Booklist 

Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life ... And Maybe The World

Make Your Bed is based on Admiral William H. McRaven's commencement speech for the graduating class from the University of Austin at Texas. (check it out HERE)

"If you want to change the world … start off by making your bed."

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

This classic book is based on a lecture that the late professor Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon University. The title of the lecture was "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." The inside cover of the book reads "The lecture he gave wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment."

"The key question to keep asking is, are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have."

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck: a counterintuitive approach to living a good life

Author Mark Manson says:  You are going to die someday. Everyone you know is going to die too. And in your short life you only have a certain amount of f*cks to give.

Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive use of your time and energy. This is true because every life has problems associated with it and finding meaning in your life will help you sustain the effort needed to overcome the particular problems you face. Thus, we can say that the key to living a good life is not giving a f*ck about more things, but rather, giving a f*ck only about the things that align with your personal values.

"Don't hope for a life without problems. Hope for a life with good problems."

Congratulations to all graduating seniors! 

What books and tips are you sending your graduates off with?

in Black and White

picture via @troutmouthidaho

On Thursday I attended a lecture by Professor Jill Gill titled  “Idaho in Black and White: Race, Civil Rights, and the Gem State’s Image”.

Jill Gill is a history professor and the Director of the Marilyn Shuler Human Rights Initiative at Boise State University. I was first introduced to Professor Gill at a City Club event, and I made a mental note that if she ever did a public lecture again I'd be sure to attend.

Notes from Idaho in Black and White...

Idaho might be best known for its racist ties to the Aryan Nations. California emigrant Richard Butler arrived in Idaho in 1974. He was drawn to Idaho by the cheap land, open gun laws, mountainous isolation and the whiteness of the population. He founded the Aryan Nations in 1977 and turned his compound into a racists’ retreat and operations center. As a result, Idaho was tied to Aryan activism. The work of local human rights heroes, who helped bankrupt Butler’s racist organization in 2000, is often overlooked.

But Idaho's racist past began long before 1974 and Richard Butler. White southerners populated the state, with an early wave of Confederates who fled the south. Former Confederates dominated Idaho politics in the 1860s and 1870s. Idaho’s elected officials solidified an Idaho-Southern states alliance on race during battles over federal anti-lynching bills. From 1922 until his death in 1940, Senator William Borah, R-ID, led the states’ rights fight against anti-lynching. He won the support of Dixiecrats (the Southern pro-segregation wing of the Democratic Party).

Then again in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy called for a civil rights bill, the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedom (a Mississippi organization dedicated to segregation) ran advertisements in Idaho newspapers and sent out mass mailings against the Civil Rights Act. 75% of Idahoans opposed the Civil Right Act.

Again, in 1968, Idaho opposed the Fair Housing Act.

The 1970's were a time of white-flight to Idaho: enter Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations.

By the 1980s, the blatant racism in Idaho had become bad for business, tourism and universities. Despite this, Idaho - in 1990 - was among the last five states to create a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The main force to finally create the holiday was not the admiration for Dr. King among legislators, but desperation to dispel Idaho’s damaged image. However, Idaho's reputation for racism appealed to conservative Californians seeking to relocate. This white-flight highway from California helped make Idaho one of the most conservative states in the nation.

Even today, Idaho lawmakers continue to champion states’ rights over human rights and women's rights - most recently with respect to Medicaid expansion, mandatory minimum reforms, pretrial detentions, expedited evictions, and protections for gay and transgender residents. The idea of "states’ rights" has become a coded excuse for racism while disenfranchising minorities, claiming “reverse discrimination,” citing religious freedom, and denying systemic inequities.

Idaho has a rough history.

During the Q&A portion of the lecture there was a book suggestion: A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis.

And the lovely BSU student sitting next to me suggested I also read: Mothers Of Massive Resistance by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

I had to order both books from our local bookstore, neither were in stock. I'll keep you posted on my reviews.

As always, it is important to consider the history of things that came before you... your part in perpetuating hierarchies... and how you can help shape local, regional, and national politics and civil rights.

white rage

I just finished reading White Rage: The Unspoken Truth Of Our Racial Divide by  Carol Anderson.

I had been at a lecture where Professor Spencer Crew discussed the key events and actors involved in the civil rights movement and the pivotal role each played in establishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the Q&A part of the discussion, an audience member asked what book we should read to be better advocates for civil rights and Professor Crew suggested White Rage.

From GoodReads:

From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”

Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.

Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

How had I never learned in American History about Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction? Reconstruction was a tragic decade in the wake of the Civil War. This is where Anderson picks up her narrative. “America was at the crossroads,” she writes, “between its slaveholding past and the possibility of a truly inclusive, vibrant democracy.” 

Carol Anderson highlights President Andrew Johnson’s aggressive opposition to the enfranchisement of black Americans. She also details the horrors of paramilitary terrorism waged by the Klan and its affiliates. 

And with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, where Southern Democrats agreed to support Rutherford B. Hayes’s claim to the presidency in exchange for an end to Reconstruction,  the South plunged back into white supremacy.

 Anderson’s book is particularly acute in recalling the Supreme Court’s shameful role in repeatedly denying constitutional relief, and in securing and ratifying the legal apartheid we know as Jim Crow.

Embarrassingly, I had never thoughtfully put together the resistance to school integration after Brown v. Board of Education, and the “Southern strategy,” Nixon’s playbook for using white anger over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ... enshrining race-baiting as a political maneuver, and the Reagan administration’s machinations in the so-called War on Drugs, and the vitriolic hatred directed at Barack Obama.

The Afterword to the new edition called After The Election: Imagining is worth reading twice.

Don't miss this video of Carol Anderson speaking on White Rage...

T

Add The Words

Thirty-Eight Witnesses by A.M. Rosenthal is a little book, consisting of only 69 pages. It is really an essay on the dangers of apathy and inaction. It is so valuable.

In 1964, a young woman in Queens was attacked, raped, and stabbed to death seventeen times over the course of half an hour outside her apartment. 

Thirty-eight of her neighbors witnessed the attack. No one did anything to stop it. No one called the police. No one came to her aid. No one seemed to care. 

This attack and murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese became one of modern history’s most unsettling and confounding conundrums for generations of psychologists, sociologists, and community members. 

How can thirty-eight ordinary citizens — people with good jobs and good families and good homes —  how could they slide so far down on the scale from empathy to apathy and allow for such brutality and injustice to happen right in front of them? How could they not band together and help?

This story, the Genovese case, has become a cliché for apathy and cowardice toward the suffering of others, and an intellectual and religious mystery: what does it mean to me? To you? To us as a society?

The bigger question, the mystery for me: how could it have happened that thirty-eight people  - thirty-eight -  heard the screams and did nothing. Two or three, all right, but everybody, all thirty-eight? All thirty-eight of them refused to answer a cry for help from a person they could not see?

And then… there’s us, today. 

Is it a greater mystery, a greater offense, that - by light of day - each of us withhold help to those suffering, when it would cost us virtually nothing and put us in no peril, even though we see their faces?

It’s 2019 in Idaho, and gay and transgender people across most of our state can be fired from their jobs, evicted from their apartments, and refused goods and services for no other reason than their sexual orientation or gender identity.

It is time for Idaho to Add The Words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the Idaho Human Rights Act. By not including these four words, we are withholding help and expressing apathy to injustice happening right before our eyes.

I call for the citizens of Idaho to band together. It is within our power to create change for the thousands of Idahoans not accurately represented in the Idaho Human Rights Act. We are individuals, but our individuality is expressed within overlapping social constructs that include: race, class, national origin, religion, age, disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation. These social constructs are woven together and have historical, economic, and political power.

In the middle of a cold night in 1964, thirty-eight people refused the risk of getting involved by answering a cry for help from a person they could not see. 

In the light of day in 2019, we will answer the cry for help and demand that the Idaho Legislature pass bill, SB 1015, to Add The Words.