Blog2.14.2021

 

Blog2.14.2021

 

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

 

Humble yourself and follow the lead of the child, but first teach the child to read.  Reading narratives to the child while it is still in the womb is a project for preparing children who will be born in the 21st century for what they are condemned to expect:  the heavy burdens of history as narrative prior to history's becoming equipment for daily life, instruments for probing inevitable uncertainties.  Always discuss with the child the centrality of narrative in the state of being human.

 

If this sounds to you like dream-work and  platitude your hearing is accurate. As what we once knew as American democracy slowly becomes a fascist desert, we must arm ourselves and our children to do battle with inconvenient truth.  Neither we nor the children can escape truth in one guise or another.

 

Listening to Carole Boston Weatherford discuss her recent children's  book Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (2021) is a sobering experience.  Unspeakable should be one of the main books we discuss with children in 2021 and beyond.  Reading enables us to speak the unspeakable silently or out-loud.

Given the events of January 6 , 2021, young and old Americans have good reasons for dwelling  in good faith with domestic terrorism and domesticated hope. Dwelling and fighting back. We must discuss Tulsa, and diverse  narratives of  Atlanta (1906),  East St. Louis (1917)Elaine, AR (1919), Chicago (1919),Rosewood, FL  (1923) We must not make lame excuses for the narratives which shall divide our nation into unequal fragments for several decades to come it is beneath dignity to merchandize hopes tied up in promises.   When the moral fabric of a nation is rent, it seems that no amount of sewing and patching can restore "normality."  On the contrary, normality makes a rapid progress into the surreal.

 

"The 1921 Tulsa Massacre" Humanities 42.1 (Winter 2021) by Thabiti Lewis and Kweku  Larry Crowe is an  adult example of articulating the unspeakable.  The authors end the article neatly:  "In many ways, it is poetic irony that science fiction has forced America to confront its very real history."  The irony, however, is grasped by a statistically insignificant number of American citizens.  One clue about how many Americans care to confront "very real history" is "The Humanities in American Life: Insights from a Survey about the Public's Attitudes & Engagement" (2020), published by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  The reports raises  as many questions as it answers, and it signals a warning to leave the cage of purely academic thought.  Walk with children in the ever-expanding mindscape of American histories and be guided by the inquiries children make.

 

Much to her credit, Weatherford has written a remarkable number of children's books on cultural subjects --- among them  the Greensboro sit-ins, Henry "Box" Brown, Aretha Franklin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Gordon Parks, jazz, Nancy Pelosi, Arthur  Schomburg, Martin Luther King, Jr. , Oprah Winfrey, Harlem, Juneteenth, and the Tuskegee Airmen. If we do a reasonably good job of promoting literacy among the young, the children will eventually thank Weatherford for building bridges.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 14, 2021

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Musings, February 8-9, 2021

    MUSINGS OF THE DAY   The mother- and father-ships of sanity have landed   Let our enemies of whatever color they be know this as we eradicate them with the tools of insanity.   Mr. Ramcat informed me this morning that I need to tie up loose ends and thank all the people who have made my life a rich and satisfying experience of 77+ years.   If you deserve my gratitude, you know who you are.   Four quotations to brighten the day------   "I don't regret my years as a prosecutor assigned to juvenile court.   In some ways, I think it is why I was put on this earth." ---Daphne R. Robinson   "While there are books and articles concentrating on young black men in the social sciences and education, thee has been comparatively little input from scholars in the arts and humanities/" Howard Rambsy II   "The hashtag 'black lives matter,' which now rings prophetically through various quarters of the United States of America and int
Read more