Writer, Educator, Editor, & Avid Book Lover
“After more than a year of roiling controversies over how to teach ethnic studies in K-12 through college classrooms, discord erupted anew last week over course content….”
Click here to read article:
California still debating ethnic studies in public education – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
Jenee Osterheldt, a Boston Globe writer has debuted a new series called “A Beautiful Resistance, which examines Black lives and Black joy beyond just sharing Black hardships.
New from culture columnist @SincerelyJenee: A Beautiful Resistance, a celebration of Black joy and Black lives. https://t.co/YdVft4wHPi pic.twitter.com/tEwFWYHOCl
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) October 28, 2020
A Beautiful Resistance (bostonglobe.com)
This is pretty cool. I just mentioned President Obama’s writing process the other day in my reflection blog post about his new book. Read along with me here.
I pre-ordered President Obama’s new book, A Promised Land. When it automatically downloaded to my Kindle at 12 a.m. on the dot this morning, I was super excited. Please feel free to join along with me in reading his 752-page what-is-sure-to-be-a-masterpiece, part I of his presidential memoirs. President Obama’s epigraph includes an African American spiritual that was clearly the inspiration for his book’s title and a Robert Frost quote. The book is broken down into seven parts: “The Bet,” “Yes We Can,” “Renegade,” “The Good Fight,” “The World as It Is,” “In the Barrel,” and “On the High Wire.” President Obama is such a great writer and storyteller. Let’s get started on my reading reflections….
Reading the opening lines of President Obama’s preface is refreshing because he acknowledges that he may not have accomplished everything that he wanted to as president. For me personally, it’s frustrating that some people who criticize him do not seem to realize that as president, it’s not humanly possible to accomplish all things and that you have to work within the constraints of the office and the supposedly three branches of government along with the politics of a divided government that was explosively divisive after the election of our first Black president.
As a writer myself, it’s supercool that he shared a glimpse of his writing process: “with a pen and yellow pad (I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness)” (p. xiii). My first thought was who will have to type up his notes? lol. As a writing instructor, that is a great line “too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness” (p. xiii). I often remind my students that a con of using word processing software is that we automatically are thrust into the editing process, instead of just letting the words pour onto the page for later revision—that the first draft is rarely (more likely never) the last draft. No matter how much I try to encourage the revision process with multiple drafts, students resist that notion and often turn in final drafts that are really first drafts with a few minor tweaks here and there just because, with no real intentionality.
Friday, November 20, 2020
President Obama wrote that he wanted to do more than give a “historical record of key events” (p. xiii), that he wanted to also give an “account of some of the political, economic, and cultural crosscurrents that helped determine the challenges” (p. xiii) that occurred during his presidential watch. I’m most interested in the cultural crosscurrents and I’m looking forward to reading about his take on the current racial climate in the country. This volume covers his first term so I have to think back to what was going on from 2009 to 2012 (and also 2008 during his presidential campaign).
Racial identity and racial identity formation are major components of my research interests. When I first started my doctoral process in 2005/2006 I was fascinated with culturally relevant pedagogy and how to foster a positive cultural identity in youth. This train of thought got me thinking about the becoming process of Blackness, which is called nigrescence (Cross). President Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” is one book I have had on my to do list to apply the nigrescence framework to. Since then, our Forever FLOTUS, Michelle Obama has published a book with that title, Becoming! This was intriguing because her book’s theme fit within my focus on the becoming process.
Another scholar, Parham, extended Cross’s theory of nigrescence to include the life cycles of nigrescence (and not just the phases), while also applying the autobiographies of W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X to the nigrescence theoretical framework. I’m interested in analyzing more contermporary examples as well as a Black woman’s perspective.
Please feel free to join me in my reading and reflection journey documented here in my blog.
Exciting news for me and my daughter! We co-wrote a book chapter in the following book (flyer pictured). Our chapter is titled “A Tale of Two Black Girl Civic Identities: A Mother/Daughter Critical Autoethnograpy on Language, Literacy, and the Black Lves Matter Movement”
Click here for ordering details on the publisher’s website.
Also available on Amazon in paperpack or hardcover.
In the introduction to this chapter of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson compares anthrax to the poisonous hatred that has run rampant throughout our society in recent years. I believe, like many others, the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, ripped the bandage off of the hidden-under-a-rock (or behind a white sheet) racism and race hatred of the faux postracial society of the 1990s. She writes that “The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life” (p. 3). She mentions that even though many of us do not want to believe it, America has always been this way even though we feign ignorance and pretend not to recognize it. I say, some of us pretend because our privilege allows us to; others of us pretend so that we can put one foot in front of the other in our daily walk among the minoritized populations who have to keep on keeping on in spite of the collective, cultural trauma of our present circumstances and histories.
Wilkerson goes on to summarize the presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, although she does not call them out by name, instead providing easily recognizable details and character traits.
This blog post is part of a series of personal reading responses to contemporary and traditional literature written by Black fiction and nonfiction authors.
It’s getting irritating seeing Black folks argue over whether or not Kamala Harris is Black or not. One thing for sure, she’s a person of color (you can see that; there’s no dispute unless you don’t deal in facts) . . . .and Black!
She can be ALL of these things at once: Black, Jamaican, Indian, Asian American, Irish
First of all, race is a social construction, in which we all have been socialized in within the lens of a White dominant society. There are many forms of identity: racial identity, cultural identity, ethnic identity, national identity, gender identity etc.
Secondly, some Black folks are touchy about their racial categories (there have been many names and labels applied to us throughout history). For some people, the terms are interchangeable and for some, not so much. I’m interchangeable, however, I prefer African-American to distinguish myself as a Black person descendent from U.S. slaves, HOWEVER, I am also Black as a member of the African diaspora, the community of people whose ancestors were Africans dispersed throughout the world by the transatlantic slave trade, especially the Americas and Caribbean (for example, Jamaica).
The “Black” experience is different depending on where you live in the world and where your ancestors were colonized, but racism is everywhere! In many places, globally, Black people are the majority, not the minority like in the United States. A Black person’s “Black lens” or perspective is also different depending on their heritage. There are Black Africans, Black Native Americans, Afro-Latinx/African-Latinx people, Afro-Caribbean/African-Caribbean people, Afro-British, Afro-German/African-German people, Afro-Canadian/African-Canadian people, bi-racial people, multi-racial people etc. etc.
Now, I’m not going to air all our “global Black family” grievances on Facebook (intra-racial conflict), but the other side of this debate is that some Black people who are not African American look down on us and think they’re better than us for various reasons (not listed here) and then you have African American Blacks who believe in the one drop rule and “take in” any and everybody, lol, or derogatorily pick on non-U.S. Blacks for having accents (I am rolling my eyes right now). We are family!
But guess what. To a non-Black person, if you LOOK Black, you’re Black. They could care less about all the important distinctions and nuances.
If you were born in the United States of America with Black skin, regardless of where your parents came from, you are Black citizen! If you immigrated here, you are a Black immigrant or Black naturalized citizen! Because guess what? When navigating White society, that’s all that many see. The color of your Black skin that comes in many, beautiful shades and hues. Regardless of your perspective of yourself and your racial, cultural, ethnic, or national heritages.
Note to White people: Black people, however, are NOT a monolithic group. Why should we have to be? Stop trying to put us in a little check box.
Note to all of us: Expand your minds. Free your minds. #Each1Teach1
Peace and blessings,
Ceci
Joe Biden chooses Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate. Harris is the first Black woman nominee as a vice presidential candidate for either parties. Previous women who were vice presidential nominees were Geraldine Ferraro (Democrat) and Sarah Palin (Republican). Harris is currently a junior senator representing California. Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically black college and university (HBCU). Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Harris, a lawyer, was elected attorney general in California in 2010 and 2014. Harris’ parents immigrated from India and Jamaica. The Veepstakes have been going around for weeks and now Democrats have their marching orders…..Biden-Harris 2020.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/08/11/us/biden-vs-trump
Our forever first lady, Michelle Obama, has a new podcast, in which she shared that she may have low grade depression stemming from issues that we can all relate to –pandemic, racism and racial tensions, and a broken government led by a man who perpetuates hateful rhetoric. Looking at my Facebook timeline and talking among family, it’s clear that Mrs. Obama’s admission was very much needed to help us all realize that we are not alone in the world as far as being the only one feeling off kilter and paralyzed by the abrupt trauma we have been experiencing since March.
Thanks First Lady for continuing to be an awesome, and awe-inspiring, leader. We love you 🙂
References:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/us/michelle-obama-coronavirus-depression-trnd/index.html
“How to Listen to Michelle Obama’s Podcast on Spotify for Free”