Juneteenth Reads

This literally just came out last month and is described as a SLIM VOLUME (I love a slim volume). Gordon-Reed is a Harvard history professor who “provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.” In 144 pages!

When people talk about women being trapped as housewives, they implicitly mean white women. Mitchell looks at Black families “asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.” As the title indicates, it spans the time of slavery to Michelle Obama in the White House. Mitchell has recently been talking more about “know-your-place aggression” on Twitter, and I highly recommend following her, because she is great.

What would this newsletter be if I didn’t include an academic press book from 1990? Wiggins looks at the beginnings of Emancipation celebrations, takes four field trips to Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and writes vividly of his experiences. It starts off looking like a somewhat daunting academic text, but if you can read his descriptions of “Texas melon patches, endless acres of gnarled vines,” “sagging russet-rusted roofs,” and “freshly plowed rows glistening in the hot afternoon sun like rolls of licorice,” then you quickly and happily realize your error.

This came out in the mid-2010s, and argues that rather than American slavery being isolated in a distant past, we are currently living in a society whose economy was immensely shaped by it. This might sound like “well, yeah,” but I would argue that (in popular culture anyway) systemic thinking has taken hold pretty recently. If you’re interested in getting more facts behind why this was and how “the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States,” then pick this up.

I love diving into a subject, because I end up running across so many titles I’ve somehow missed for years. Camp writes about enslaved Black women in the South, and “discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper.” I love her thesis that these (sometimes) small and bodily acts of everyday resistance “helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts.” I also love the phrase “everyday resistance.”

This was referenced in Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and I’ve been interested in it for a while, so I wanted to make sure and highlight it. Strings looks at art, magazine articles, medical journals, etc, and says that fat phobia, “as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of ‘savagery’ and racial inferiority” and that “it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity.” It is so important to be conscious of these sorts of things! Our current cultural values have not been the same forever and they will continue to change, but we (if we can) should spend a little time examining why they are what they are.