Blood Done Sign My Name

Just finished Timothy Tyson's memoir of rural North Carolina in the late 60s and early 70s.

Blood Done Sign My Name
0609610589
(I read the unabridged CD edition, skillfully narrated by Robertson Dean. )

A child of a liberal white Methodist preacher, Tyson skillfully blends homiletic and storytelling traditions to examine the personal and societal impacts of white privilege and racism. The cold-blooded daylight murder of a young African-American, and the wildly various reactions to this crime, provide a lens on a particular time and place as well as an opportunity to meditate on what's lost when people don't know their own histories.

I laughed, I cried, and I learned a lot. In particular, he does an excellent job challenging the whitewash of the civil rights movement -- I found it a particularly bracing antidote to the recent nonsense of how LBJ ensured black people's voting rights. He firmly demonstrates both the contributions and shortcomings of white liberals. Tyson counters the marketing of Martin Luther King, Jr into a "kind of Black Santa Claus," providing many examples of the long-standing, grass-roots, widespread, and sometimes violent foundations of African Americans' campaign for true citizenship.

Nothing about us without us

Some days it's not worth chewing through the leather restraints ... but then there's a story like this on NPR:

Supreme Court Hears Schizophrenia Case

The "Day to Day" hosts talk with a Supreme Court reporter, and then with a university professor who has been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

"Nothing about us without us!" was a cry first raised by South African disability rights campaigners.