2014 has been a crazy, hard summer around the globe. Here at home, we’ve been riveted to the struggle unfolding in Ferguson. Like the movie Groundhog Day, the U.S. seems trapped in a time loop, doomed to repeat events in a climate of unresolved racial fear, frustration, distrust, and anger.
For many of us, this summer has been a call to intensify our work to dismantle the racism which permeates our homes, communities, nation. It’s hard to uproot racism from our psyches and institutions, but alarmingly easy for our lives to be distorted by assumptions of either dominance or submission. Anti-racism activist-educator Jane Elliott showed us this during her blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment in a 3rd grade classroom in 1968 and in similar exercises with adults around the globe. (See links below.)
Do you remember the summer of 1968?
I recently read two young adult (YA) novels by Rita Williams-Garcia. They brought back the events of 1968 — shooting deaths of MLK, Bobby Kennedy, and teenaged Bobby Hutton, who became a martyr to the cause of “black power.” It was a summer of unrest, as protests intensified against the war in Vietnam and the Black Panthers organized to address ongoing police brutality in their communities.
One Crazy Summer
Whether you remember the events of 1968 or have only read about them in history books, it’s worth taking a new look through the eyes of 11-year-old Delphine in One Crazy Summer. She travels with her sisters Vonetta and Fern, from Brooklyn to Oakland, to spend a month with Cecile, the mother who abandoned them five years earlier. Cecile’s a real character — harsh, aloof, hostile, complicated. The girls are pleased to discover she at least lives in a house. 
Instead of going to Disneyland or the beach, the girls are thrust into the world of an urban summer camp run by the Black Panthers. Big Ma, their traditional, church-going grandmother, had warned them about radicals, but soon the girls are exposed to a new way of seeing the world.
They also learn that their mother spends all her time in the kitchen, cranking out original poems and Black Panther posters on a printing press. Later in the story, the girls watch as Cecile is arrested and put in the back of a police car. She’s released a few days later in time to see her girls on stage at a Black Panther rally, reciting one of her poems.
There are no miraculous transformations in this book. Misunderstandings and hurts abound, but there is growth, insight, healing, humor, and history in the making.
P.S. Be Eleven
The sequel to One Crazy Summer is P.S. Be Eleven. Now back in Bed-Stuy, the girls weave Black Panther lingo into every interaction (“All power to the people!”) and, simultaneously, get swept up in the Jackson Five craze.
They try to make sense of their Uncle Darnell, who returns from Vietnam physically intact but spiritually and psychologically wounded. His sleep interrupted by screaming nightmares, he turns for solace to drugs.
The girls’ father is in love with a woman who campaigns to make Shirley Chisholm the first African-American woman elected to Congress. Big Ma, heartbroken in a hundred different ways, returns to the South.
The book’s title comes from the wild, homemade postcards that arrive from Cecile. She wants Delphine to ease up on feeling responsible for everything and let herself be a child of eleven (even after she turns twelve).
These books are a great way for kids to learn recent American history through the voice of a precocious preteen, and for white adults to hear from a range of black voices about black experience. A whole, vast and varied community comes to life in Williams-Garcia’s able hands. It’s worth the read, especially after the crazy summer we’ve just had.
To Go Deeper:
“12 Things White People Can Do Now Because Ferguson” by Janee Woods, Quartz, August 17, 2014
“Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise”
“A Class Divided” Frontline
Jane Elliott — Brown Eyes vs. Blue Eyes (@10 min summary)
“How Do You Identify Racism? The Angry Eye with Jane Elliott” (30 minutes with a college class)
Books
One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, HarperCollins/ 2010
P.S. Be Eleven by Rita Williams-Garcia, Amistad / 2013
Rita Williams Garcia Talks about One Crazy Summer (@ 7 minutes) at Vermont College of Fine Arts
This is not a fairytale. One woman came from a world of talking mice and sleeping beauties, the other from 14 years in the hell of a civil war, with the devil himself on the loose. When Abigail Disney, (Walt’s grandniece) visited Liberia, she was shocked to learn about Leymah Gbowee and the thousands of women who had successfully and nonviolently brought an end a long civil war three years earlier. She hadn’t heard anything about it.
One day, Leymah Gbowee, a social worker who counseled ex-child soldiers, decided enough was enough. Women had to take on both the warlords and the corrupt regime of President Charles Taylor and demand peace. She turned to the women in her church, asked them to dress all in white, bring a friend, and meet her at the fish market to pray. A call was issued over the radio, and the women showed up. They sat where President Taylor could see them from his office window.
They wrote a position statement and marched through the streets of Monrovia to present it to the president and demand a meeting. The women had their first victory on April 23, 2003, when Taylor finally met with a women’s peace contingent, while other women sat outside the office, holding hands and praying. He agreed to attend peace talks in Ghana if the women could find the warlords and get them to come.
It’s been a summer of blood and tears, here, there, and everywhere. The news has been unrelentingly painful — cries of “Don’t shoot!” in our streets, massacres around the globe, Ebola, kidnapped schoolgirls. The suicide of a beloved actor who laughed through his tears set off an avalanche of pent-up feelings on Facebook.
You’d think, in 2014, men would be embarrassed to so blatantly exclude women. Remember Congressman Darrell Issa’s men-only panel on birth control here in the U.S. just a few years ago? At least the all-male photo-op of Bush signing an abortion bill earned them some bad press.
This in-your-face exclusion of women has made me a pissed-off peacemaker and cranky crone. For solace, I devoured Rebecca Solnit’s slim new book in one sitting. Men Explain Things to Me is the best read of the summer. Her seven essays offer an articulate description of subtle and not-so-subtle ways women are silenced and erased and how this hurts us all (something feminists of all genders know). The title essay went viral in 2008 for good reason (it opens with a scathingly funny anecdote), and “The Longest War” should be required reading, although it will make you weep.
The lop-sidedness of this summer’s male-led rampaging and feeble efforts at mending prompted me to seek literary examples of turning-the-tables for counterbalance.
In Lois Waisbrooker’s A Sex Revolution, written in 1893, men agree to change roles with women for fifty years as a social experiment, to see if women can end war.
Articles & essays
Barr, Marlene S., ed. 
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. 
This week, I honored the memory of August 1945, when the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by writing about the resistance of the Shibokusa women for my new book on creative nonviolence. It lifted my spirits. I hope it lifts yours, too.
After most farm families gave up and moved to the cities, these tough, steadfastly antiwar grandmothers formed the Shibokusa Mother’s Committee in 1955, determined to fight for their land and disrupt business-as-usual on the military base. They knew that militarism meant death to people and animals and violence to the earth.
ONE: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Bashing in baby skulls is a centuries old military tactic. It’s part of war, as is destroying the children’s landscape, families, playmates. In Vietnam, the U.S. did it with bombs, napalm, and Agent Orange. We do it now with drone attacks. And the beat goes on.
There is deep longing for ways to resolve conflict without killing each other. This spring I watched tourists at the John Lennon “Strawberry Fields” memorial in Central Park. I took pictures of people taking pictures. Here’s my favorite. One after the other, they stood on the “Imagine” mosaic. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one …”
FIVE: Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971), the Father of Television, thought his invention would bring peace on earth. Seeing the lives of others up close, we’d realize our shared humanity and no longer want to kill one another. Oh well.
HAROLD
To Go Deeper: