HOW WE HEAL: A Journey Toward Truth, Racial Healing, and Community Transformation from the Inside Out, a balm of sense and calmness in a troubled time

HOW WE HEAL: A Journey Toward Truth, Racial Healing, and Community Transformation from the Inside Out
La JUNE MONTGOMERY TABRON
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In How We Heal, La June Montgomery Tabron, President and CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, makes a powerful case for hope through racial healing.

From a vivid portrait of her childhood in 1960s Detroit to her leadership of one of the world's largest philanthropic institutions, La June shares her full-circle, American story—a coming-of-age journey where she gains a firsthand understanding of how systemic racism prevents our children and communities from thriving and learns about the transformative role healing can play in helping all of us transcend the legacy of racial inequity.

As she rises to her position as the first female and first African American leader of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (Wikipedia link added), La June experiences the healing power of sharing and listening with empathy. And with the help of mentors and colleagues, she refines the message that will guide the foundation's mission for years to Healing can begin only with truth telling.

Empowered by the mission set forth by its founder to support children and families "without regard to sex, race, creed, or nationality," the foundation explores a racial healing framework that transforms communities and individuals around the world—from small rural towns and big cities across the United States, including La June's own beloved Detroit, to Mexico, Haiti, and beyond.

This book serves as a testament to the power of transformation and a blueprint for how each of us, no matter who we are or how we lead, can use racial healing to bridge the empathy deficits in our communities.

How We Heal illuminates a path that all of us can follow—from trust to empathy, from understanding to repair—one conversation and one connection at a time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: We are at an inflection point in our development as a society. La June Montgomery Tabron knows this because she has lived through another inflection point: Detroit in the 1960s was on the front line of the Civil Rights struggle as African Americans asserted their right to be full participants in the US civil society that had systematically excluded them. Author Tabron is an MBA holder, thus a thoroughgoing participant in the system she is urging us to fix with her. As a professional administrator, her focus is on practical, achievable differences in one's personal behavior...listening, not simply expecting to be heard, is top of her list.

Given her long background in business, I'd expect nothing else from her. The way she brings readers along on her personal journey makes her commonsensical words all the more impactful. In a political climate of hatred and fear-stoking, of attacks on "DEI" efforts and their abandonment by many corporate entities, it is soothing to hear from the anti-DEI embodiment that is Author Tabron.

I felt I was sitting with my old friend and hearing her tell the whole story of what happened on her path to success as I read the book. It was that sort of personal connection I felt she was working to achieve, and mostly succeeded at presenting. In the moments where it was less successful it was down to not needing to be reminded of some important facts; hardly a sin in the story of a person's life.

What makes Author Tabron's point most effectively is the fact that she is drawing from her own life and her efforts to shift the course of a ninety-five-year-old multi-billion-dollar foundation as the first woman and the first African-American to head it. Her work there is clearly the source material of the book. The power of honest communication, coupled with empathetic listening, is very much the takeaway technique running through the whole story.

It is more important than ever to use our human capacity for empathy and our societally discouraged ability to listen instead of waiting to talk in order to combat the rising tide of politically motivated divisive language and ideas. The reasons for, and the ways to, apply both are in this easy-to-understand, easy-to-read, memoir.

I really hope some of y'all have reason to pick up the book to polish up the skills found inside its story.

KLAXON READS: "ARE YOU CALLING ME A RACIST?": Why We Need to Stop Talking about Race and Start Making Real Antiracist Change, & YOU BELONG HERE: The Power of Being Seen, Heard, and Valued on Your Own Terms

"ARE YOU CALLING ME A RACIST?": Why We Need to Stop Talking about Race and Start Making Real Antiracist Change
SARITA SRIVASTA
NYU Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$26.59 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Shows why diversity workshops fail and offers concrete solutions for a path forward

Despite decades of anti-racism workshops and diversity policies in corporations, schools, and nonprofit organizations, racial conflict has only increased in recent years. “Are You Calling Me a Racist?” reveals why these efforts have failed to effectively challenge racism and offers a new way forward.

Drawing from her own experience as an educator and activist, as well as extensive interviews and analyses of contemporary events, Sarita Srivastava shows that racial encounters among well-meaning people are ironically hindered by the emotional investment they have in being seen as good people. Diversity workshops devote energy to defending, recuperating, educating, and inwardly reflecting, with limited results, and these exercises often make things worse. These “Feel-Good politics of race,” Srivastava explains, train our focus on the therapeutic and educational, rather than on concrete practices that could move us towards true racial equity.

In this type of approach to diversity training, people are more concerned about being called a racist than they are about changing racist behavior.

“Are You Calling Me a Racist?” is a much-needed challenge to the status quo of diversity training, and will serve as a valuable resource for anyone dedicated to dismantling racism in their communities, educational institutions, public or private organizations, and social movements.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Read this:

Is the assignment for November 5th, 2024, clear now? Choosing to stay rooted in the conflict over "race" as we so wrongly call differences in skin color and/or ethnicity is choosing to feel good about being Right over making substantive progress. Harris, imperfect and politically impure as she is (and must be in order to get a shot at the US President's chair) will not drag the country back into a dead, disgusting past of unchallenged racism, sexism, homophobia, and unchecked capitalism.

Will everything be perfect? No. When has it ever been? It *will* be better than a Vance presidency that will usher in the Nerd Reich of unchecked, surveillance-happy corporate fake people to then unfetter their squads of tech scum to set about further enshittifying our lives at an increasing rate. That hegemony already makes tech work more poorly for non-whites, and limits the benefits of tech to a very elite group.

These are the stakes. Understand the assignment. Vote for the lesser of the evils because you have no options but the ones we're given. Stop whining about the way the world is and do something to make it better.

A Harris presidency won't magically do anything at all. It might, depending on her actions, renew the DEI conversation, and refocus it on reparative justice instead of on how we, white people, "feel" when racism is brought up; on the enforced sharing of Black and other non-white people's lived experience in some mystical communion of getting to know "the other side;" on burying and distracting attention from action in the real world, not the therapy arena of workshops.

I'm big on therapy, y'all, don't come at me! It's just that therapy is mental masturbation if it doesn't turn into actual behavioral change. If you as an individual need therapy, go find it. It's never been easier with the multiple online sources readily available at a big variety of out-of-pocket costs. We as a society, however, need action to build back better. (Biden's woefully underused and succinct catchphrase; especially useful when "race" is the subject) The world is on literal fire. No woman, of any skin color or native tongue, can be wasted on a stunted uneducated life of sexual and social servitude. We need literally every single person alive today to take this challenge to change as an instruction not an invitation that can be declined.

This book is a great way to change the prescription in your social glasses.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


YOU BELONG HERE: The Power of Being Seen, Heard, and Valued on Your Own Terms
KIM DABBS
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.88 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a world overcrowded with labels, don’t allow your identity to be defined by other people. Learn how to take back your power, choose to feed the aspects of your identity that serve you, and let go of those that don’t.

Everyone feels like an outsider at some point in their life—when we walk into a room and think to ourselves, “I don’t belong here.” To avoid these feelings of exclusion, many of us hide our authentic selves and allow others to define our identity.

You Belong Here offers a new framework that allows each of us to define how we want to be seen, heard, and valued on our own terms so we feel a sense of belonging in any situation. Further, it serves as a launchpad for organizational leaders and culture builders to create safe spaces for individuals to show up as their authentic selves.

Readers will explore our four identities:

Our Lived Identity is made up of the aspects of our identity we inherit when we are born into the world.

Our Learned Identity includes the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen or claimed as we make our way through the world.

Our Lingering Identity is the identity we default to when we feel like an outsider and fall back into as a survival mechanism.

Our Loved Identity is where we find our authentic selves and see ourselves through a lens of empowerment.

In the journey to understand our past experiences and how society has established barriers to entry, we can design our own future, rooted in our Loved Identity. We learn to rewrite the stories that aren’t serving us and embrace the ones that do. Rather than look for a seat at someone else’s table, we find the tools to build our own.

When we fully leverage this and live with authenticity and purpose, we can be seen, heard, and valued in a way that gives us a sense of belonging at home, at work, and in society. Belonging is realized when we understand everyone is an outsider and it’s the power to create space for those differences that unite us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: See? I really am pro-therapy!

This succinct self-help book is a quality read for anyone who needs to sharpen their sense of themself as a worthy and worthwhile contributor in order to become an effective leader. The trick here is to use these carefully thought-out "Identities" to lead others into a stronger commitment to their own identities being expressed in the world.

The present pass has multiple axes of crisis. Why and how they came to be is, at this moment, less urgent a topic of discussion than what the hell we need to do about it all. No one has every answer. No one individual is going to Fix the World. The usefulness of every person's contribution to society isn't a helpful focus of attention, ever really but certainly not now.

We need to use techniques like these simply delineated ones to instill the sense of strength, of personal power, of ability to effect change and affect others in the world in positive ways, in the greatest number of people. All hands are needed at the pump to keep the boat afloat. Learning how best to support a sense of urgency in one's self, and effectively communicate it into action that's both personal and group-based will be a lot easier when one has a sense of one's value to every situation. Learning the technique Author Dabbs supplies here will provide some very useful tools to achieve this goal.

Don't ignore the value of a strong sense of your own power and ability and right to use it. If you're feeling helpless and useless in the face of the world's problems, read this book to start topping up your emotional fuel tanks.

THE HOUSE OF BEING, Poet Laureate Trethewey's entry into Yale's Why I Write series

THE HOUSE OF BEING (Why I Write series)
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Yale University Press
$18.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey

In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.

In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Her mother sang her John Brown's Body as a means of soothing the Chernobyl-level burn of racism as the mixed-"race" (how I hate that we still use that horrible, divisive pseudoscientific calumny by default!) family drove past confederate battle flags! (Frequently, then, in her home state of Mississippi...it's on their state flag.) Now, how horrifying an image is that, when that damn dirge that starts with the words "John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave" is soothing?! This is the absolute most powerful statement of the horrors the convulsively dying Jim Crow system of the US South inflicted on people of color (another digression: This locution is deeply uncomfortable to white people like me who, in the 1960s, were loudly excoriated for calling African-Americans either "black" or "colored" in the South).

Returning to my scheduled review: Poet Trethewey was unique, then, from birth forward. She was the product of miscegenation (that horrifying term I'm glad I need to define) as her parents were not legally married in her home state until Loving v. Virginia was decided a year after she was born. Her Black matrilineal line was stuffed with women who had embodied what can only be called triumphs of the will, and all the merrier to say that when I know that this application of that phrase will horrify Nazi true believers. The influence of her poet/professor papa is no doubt there somewhere, but Poet Trethewey does not work on one cylinder, she fires on all of 'em.

I can imagine some astute observers wondering what the devil is going on here. Mudge HATES poetry! some are thinking. Some are quite correct. I loathe the experience of reading poetry the same way I loathe the experience of riding the bus. It's crammed with stuff I don't want to know about, it's uncomfortably tight to sit in and in no way offers me enough room or seats designed for my spatial dimensions, it sways and janks and judders over each crack in the road, and the air conditioning almost never works until it suddenly blasts January-on-the-Siberian-steppe gales for a few seconds.

That does not mean I am insensible to its influence on most people. I see it, I get it, I am not of that group but they are quite clearly expressing their approval. And, lest we lose sight of this, the book is Poet Trethewey's *writing about writing*; that is always interesting. As I suspect all good writing must be, the life led by the child-poet became the matter of the adult; in her experiences of racism, white supremacy, and Southern culture, she speaks with a voice that reaches deep into the National Conversation of the US as well as into the emotional cores of many, many, many people.

At under 100pp, this is an afternoon's read for me. It was a pleasure to read...if you've read Memorial Drive, her memoir, you'll know that Poet Trethewey is gifted in prose writing, and if you haven't what is wrong with you?!...and measures her life against her need to write, like a learner sounding out words in a new language. The essay is part of Yale University Press's terrific series of writerly essays. I have only one cavil to report. I felt the origin of the essay as a lecture rather more than I would have liked. I put it down to the poet's innate aurality of expression. I ended up needing to read passages aloud to understand what was being said, and that was also the only way I felt I *got* the Southernness of the Trethewey household. (This also got me very dark glowers from my roommate who is hostile to things literary.)

Hardly a sin, but for this reader a discomfort I could've done without. So can I recommend it to you? Absolutely, and I do. I think anyone interested in writers as entities who transmute life into Art, people intrigued by the shocking dichotomies of Southern culture, and women who batten on reading the success and happiness of their fellows, will all be especially gruntled. I hope men who wonder what hell the fuss about this poetry thing is will give it a read, too, as well as any and all people of color looking to gladden themselves on the success of their own.

CHASING BATS AND TRACKING RATS Urban Ecology, Community Science, and How We Share Our Cities, great message for the 8-and-up crowd

CHASING BATS AND TRACKING RATS Urban Ecology, Community Science, and How We Share Our Cities
CYLITA GUY (illus. Cornelia Li)
Annick Press
$19.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of fiv

The Publisher Says: Gripping narrative non-fiction with STEM and social justice themes that proves cities can be surprisingly wild places—and why understanding urban nature matters.

What can city bees tell us about climate change? How are we changing coyote behavior? And what the heck is a science bike? Featuring the work of a diverse group of eleven scientists—herself included!—Dr. Cylita Guy shows how studying urban wildlife can help us make cities around the world healthier for all of their inhabitants.

In the process, Guy reveals how social injustices like racism can affect not only how scientists study city wildlife, but also where urban critters are likelier to thrive. Sidebars include intriguing animal facts and the often-wacky tools used by urban ecologists, from a ratmobile to a bug vacuum. Cornelia Li’s engaging illustrations bring the scientists’ fieldwork adventures to life, while urban ecology challenges encourage readers to look for signs of wildlife in their own neighborhoods.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another book whose worldview and frame of reference I share, so I strongly recommend to you. This is #Booksgiving. We need young people...grandkid age for most of us, from 8 on up...to reframe their relationship with the urban world they live in. The best way to do that is to say, "you know how rats are talked bad and mean about? Here are some facts that you need to know about rats:"

...and lo! There's a fact file in front of the hateful messaging that has led to vital ecological members being abused and eliminated, with all the problems that always brings. (Remember what happened when we slaughtered the wolves in Yellowstone? Let's learn from our mistakes and pass it on to the kids whose world this is.)

Dr. Guy doesn't stint on the role of social oppression and stigmatization in the urban environmental crisis. We should all be scared about the bees being in ill health. Urban areas have, and need, bees as well as the countryside. The ways to help bees navigate the urban landscape, and what to look for in a healthy urban ecology, could stand explaining:

A good book filled with the right kind of ideas about the world, its problems, and the best solutions we can think up to those problems. (In my opinion, of course.)

Great #Booksgiving gift for the still-single-digit aged budding scientist, or garden lover, or really anyone at all in that age range.