Table of Contents

Word Wealth: Messages From My Vocabulary Book

I looked back at my junior high school vocabulary book, Word Wealth, to see what words I learned back then, and what else I may have absorbed, unintentionally.

What IS This about Bloodlines?

I had looked down on people who pursue their family trees and DNA test results – until I discovered what I was missing.

Reading My Mother: Eugenics, Race and Foster Care

After reading my mother’s 1920s college paper and 1930s orphanage report, I thought they showed her to be a bigot. When I read more closely, I saw something quite different.

My Circuitous Path toward Cultural Respect

I assumed that to be “culturally competent,” I’d need to learn everything about ‘other’ cultures. But I’ve found a simpler route: cultural humility.

Keeping My Integrity AND an Open Mind

As I learn to listen intensely to others’ experiences, how do I stay honest to my own, although possibly flawed, understanding of reality?

Seeing Institutional Racism: Where IS It?
I seek to uncover hidden racism in health care, transportation, and sports, but seeing clearly is not always so easy.

Giving Jargon Its Due

I rebelled against the unfamiliar words used by my fellow racial justice activists, especially academics, until I realized that to change people’s thinking, we may need to create such new words.

Books that Matter to Me

I recommend these 18 books published between 2010 and 2012, written by white authors and by authors of color, in genres ranging from non-fiction and memoir, to novels, poetry, and personal testimony.

Here’s the Table of Contents for Was I Thinking? Digging Deeper into Everyday Racism

Word Wealth: Messages From My Vocabulary Book

I looked back at my junior high school vocabulary book, Word Wealth, to see what words I learned back then, and what else I may have absorbed, unintentionally.

What IS This about Bloodlines?

I had looked down on people who pursue their family trees and DNA test results – until I discovered what I was missing.

Reading My Mother: Eugenics, Race and Foster Care

After reading my mother’s 1920s college paper and 1930s orphanage report, I thought they showed her to be a bigot. When I read more closely, I saw something quite different.

My Circuitous Path toward Cultural Respect

I assumed that to be “culturally competent,” I’d need to learn everything about ‘other’ cultures. But I’ve found a simpler route: cultural humility.

Keeping My Integrity AND an Open Mind

As I learn to listen intensely to others’ experiences, how do I stay honest to my own, although possibly flawed, understanding of reality?

Seeing Institutional Racism: Where IS It?

I seek to uncover hidden racism in health care, transportation, and sports, but seeing clearly is not always so easy.

Giving Jargon Its Due

I rebelled against the unfamiliar words used by my fellow racial justice activists, especially academics, until I realized that to change people’s thinking, we may need to create such new words.

Books that Matter to Me

I recommend these 18 books published between 2010 and 2012, written by white authors and by authors of color, in genres ranging from non-fiction and memoir, to novels, poetry, and personal testimony.

So I remained uninformed, especially about male private parts. At home, we were a family of females – my mother and three girls –plus my Dad, who kept his clothes on. Well, I once walked in on him in the bathroom but speedily backed out and blocked out – the equivalent of the Victorian faint – whatever I had seen, so that I knew no more about the male body after that moment than I had before.

Necking in high school gave me clues, like that boys break into a sweat and squirm mightily after a few minutes of kissing. In my diary, I wrote about my own responses with generalized vagueness. “I got emotional,” I told Diary Dear, and “I melted when he kissed me,” avoiding via metaphor any recognition of my own capacity for orgasm.

My mother tried to help. Once, I came home red-faced from necking with my boyfriend. The next day she proffered this advice: If a boy ever tried to do anything to you that you don’t want him to do, tell him to take a cold shower.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

At college, I studied Art History. From the darkened lecture hall, we watched slides of Italian Renaissance art, including Michelangelos’s David. I admired his magnificent hands but somehow missed observing his other equally impressive parts. In my Junior year, when I finally saw a man up close and in the flesh, I was startled. By then, knew about the penis, but I wasn’t prepared for what dangled beneath.

Not that I understood the female body any better. I could be one of the few young women of my era (who knows? – we avoided explicit sex talk back then) who did not explore my body: or, to be post-50s frank, masturbated. I would have been shocked at the idea that 20 years later, in the feminist 70s, women would gather with specula and mirrors to examine and celebrate “our bodies, ourselves.”

I even sidestepped the opportunity that tampons gave me, inserting the gadget so deftly that my interior anatomy remained unexplored. A few years later, when I married and bought a diaphragm, I squeezed it, pushed it in, and withdrew my fingers so quickly that I failed to even check exactly where the device had ensconced itself.

Which is why, two children later, I decided I had cancer “down there.” That year, we were living in Paris and considered ourselves cosmopolitan. One day, my hand somehow – I suspect by accident –came in contact with the inside of my – by now I can say it – vagina. I panicked. I called my husband at work and told him I’d discovered a tumor. He too panicked, sped home, left the kids at the neighbor’s, and drove me through several Parisian arrondisements, seeking a doctor willing to operate immediately. We tried three medical centers before we found one willing to treat the American toute suite.

The doctor, being French, was dignified in speech and demeanor. He examined what I knew to be my tumor-ridden insides. He told me to get dressed. He asked me to sit down across from him. No expression crossed his face. He spoke to me in a calm voice. “What you have is not cancer,’ he said. “What you felt, madame, is your cervix. It belongs there.”

My Dyslexia, by Philip Schultz. This Pulitzer Prize winning poet describes growing up being assumed, and believing himself, to be dumb: it was not until he was 58, when his 2nd grade son was diagnosed with dyslexia, that he realized that he too was dyslexic. He describes how his non-diagnosis led to him acting out, to covering in many ways, to loving books but disliking reading, to discovering ways to teach writing (he created a Writers Studio). Ironically, his publisher, Norton, seems to have a disability, as well: it let slip a misspelling (dyslexia) and a blurb implying that he won a Nobel Prize in science rather than poetry. Gail Mazur loaned me this book (she knows the author).

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver (1998). A novel whose narrator shifts between five female characters, a Rashomon-like format that fascinates me. A fundamentalist Baptist minister takes his four daughters to an isolated village in the Congo, just as the Belgian colonizers (who used to cut off the hands of mineworkers who didn’t meet quota) hand over control. The people have just elected Patrice Lumumba, who the U.S. soon after arranges to be killed. The saga goes from 1959 to the 80s. It’s an excoriating vision of clueless, ineffectual Christian missionaries, of racial prejudice that personal interactions (except in the father’s case) break down, of individual women whose talents and goals and thoughts remain largely unsaid, but are eventually fulfilled. I wanted to finish the 530 page book by the end of our stay, so I raced through the last 100 pages, but the rich portrayal of each person’s experience and of the dynamics and consequences of colonialism will stay with me. Kingsolver funded (until recently, through the National Writers Union’s Service Organization) the Bellwether Prize: $25,000 plus publication of a fiction mss. with social justice themes.

Lone Holdout: A Memoir, by Linda Cox (Charles Street Press, 2010). Cox worked in the editorial department of an unnamed Boston publisher for 12 years, but after a successful class action sex discrimination case in which she was one of five named plaintiffs, she became co-owner of a Charles Street (Beacon Hill) bookstore. She describes serving on a jury for the first time and becoming the one jurist who doubted the prosecutions’ police witnesses. The book goes through the testimony, noting her questions and doubts. On trial was a young Dominican immigrant, charged with selling drugs and weapons violations. Her refusal to convict caused a hung jury: the young man was then retried and convicted. Convinced of the imprisoned man’s innocence, she rounded up pro bono lawyers and raised money to pay for private detectives. A judge finally granted a motion for a new trial, based on documentation of exculpatory evidence, and the inherent unreliability of single-witness identification cases. The arresting officer was proved to be a rogue cop who had been the subject of 27 internal investigations (for brutality, extorting money and sex from drug dealers and their girlfriends, etc.). He was convicted of attempted extortion and larceny and got a 4-6 year prison term. Cox is honest about the young man she defended: after 18 months in prison, he couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. After taking a ride with someone who had drugs in car, he was sent to prison for a year and then deported to Dominican Republic. This case happened in 1988: it took Cox 20 years to write the book, which was almost made into the film, but in the end was self-published. I read self-published books by people I know because I like to make up my mind about their quality, and not react to mainstream-media hype. And I was proved right: her independently published book was chosen to be listed in Publishers Weekly new (as of last year) self-publishing section (25-pgs long) and one of 25 reviewed by Publishers Weekly!

Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, by Amy Alexander (Beacon Press, 2011). Alexander used to live in Cambridge: I read her the book she co-wrote with Dr. Alvin Poussaint on African Americans and suicide, Lay My Burden Down. She wrote for the San Francisco Examiner while still in college, risked danger to cover the 1991 L.A. “riots” for the Sacramento Bee, only to have a copyeditor insert “savage” and “rampaging” into her otherwise carefully reported article. She later writes for the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She names what the few publishers who effectively diversified their staffs did so: by tying news managers’ raises and bonuses, in part at least, to the rates of minority hiring and retention. She is frank in her evaluation of the National Association of Black Journalists, calling it “toothless” except for its professional training programs.

Learning From the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer, by John Maher (self-published 2011). I don’t remember how I heard of my neighbor’s book but the title intrigued me: what can we learn from the Sixties? He grew up with an Irish-background poor to riches businessman father, which gave him some economic leeway to devote much of his life to organizing. He was an organizer of SDS, Vietnam Summer, Neighbor to Neighbor, and also taught in the Somerville and Boston schools. He was involved in the Progressive Labor Party, but eventually left it, considering it a cult. His FBI file is 2000 pages long (maybe in part because his brother was an open Communist Party member). To organize lower-income people, he decided to work in a Cambridge rubber manufacturing plant, but left because it felt inauthentic to hide his Harvard background. Each chapter ends with a list of principles/practices he learned in each organizing effort. He is frank about the mistakes he made, but also clear about one-on-one, door-to-door, in-person dialogue that he sees essential. I may have been one of the people he recruited to go door-to-door to rally opposition to the Vietnam War (and later to get rent controlled passed in Cambridge, although I don’t remember him, which fits one or his campaign organizing principles – to listen more than direct.

My Dyslexia, by Philip Schultz. This Pulitzer Prize winning poet describes growing up being assumed, and believing himself, to be dumb: it was not until he was 58, when his 2nd grade son was diagnosed with dyslexia, that he realized that he too was dyslexic. He describes how his non-diagnosis led to him acting out, to covering in many ways, to loving books but disliking reading, to discovering ways to teach writing (he created a Writers Studio). Ironically, his publisher, Norton, seems to have a disability, as well: it let slip a misspelling (dyslexia) and a blurb implying that he won a Nobel Prize in science rather than poetry. Gail Mazur loaned me this book (she knows the author).

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver (1998). A novel whose narrator shifts between five female characters, a Rashomon-like format that fascinates me. A fundamentalist Baptist minister takes his four daughters to an isolated village in the Congo, just as the Belgian colonizers (who used to cut off the hands of mineworkers who didn’t meet quota) hand over control. The people have just elected Patrice Lumumba, who the U.S. soon after arranges to be killed. The saga goes from 1959 to the 80s. It’s an excoriating vision of clueless, ineffectual Christian missionaries, of racial prejudice that personal interactions (except in the father’s case) break down, of individual women whose talents and goals and thoughts remain largely unsaid, but are eventually fulfilled. I wanted to finish the 530 page book by the end of our stay, so I raced through the last 100 pages, but the rich portrayal of each person’s experience and of the dynamics and consequences of colonialism will stay with me. Kingsolver funded (until recently, through the National Writers Union’s Service Organization) the Bellwether Prize: $25,000 plus publication of a fiction mss. with social justice themes.

Lone Holdout: A Memoir, by Linda Cox (Charles Street Press, 2010). Cox worked in the editorial department of an unnamed Boston publisher for 12 years, but after a successful class action sex discrimination case in which she was one of five named plaintiffs, she became co-owner of a Charles Street (Beacon Hill) bookstore. She describes serving on a jury for the first time and becoming the one jurist who doubted the prosecutions’ police witnesses. The book goes through the testimony, noting her questions and doubts. On trial was a young Dominican immigrant, charged with selling drugs and weapons violations. Her refusal to convict caused a hung jury: the young man was then retried and convicted. Convinced of the imprisoned man’s innocence, she rounded up pro bono lawyers and raised money to pay for private detectives. A judge finally granted a motion for a new trial, based on documentation of exculpatory evidence, and the inherent unreliability of single-witness identification cases. The arresting officer was proved to be a rogue cop who had been the subject of 27 internal investigations (for brutality, extorting money and sex from drug dealers and their girlfriends, etc.). He was convicted of attempted extortion and larceny and got a 4-6 year prison term. Cox is honest about the young man she defended: after 18 months in prison, he couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. After taking a ride with someone who had drugs in car, he was sent to prison for a year and then deported to Dominican Republic. This case happened in 1988: it took Cox 20 years to write the book, which was almost made into the film, but in the end was self-published. I read self-published books by people I know because I like to make up my mind about their quality, and not react to mainstream-media hype. And I was proved right: her independently published book was chosen to be listed in Publishers Weekly new (as of last year) self-publishing section (25-pgs long) and one of 25 reviewed by Publishers Weekly!

Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, by Amy Alexander (Beacon Press, 2011). Alexander used to live in Cambridge: I read her the book she co-wrote with Dr. Alvin Poussaint on African Americans and suicide, Lay My Burden Down. She wrote for the San Francisco Examiner while still in college, risked danger to cover the 1991 L.A. “riots” for the Sacramento Bee, only to have a copyeditor insert “savage” and “rampaging” into her otherwise carefully reported article. She later writes for the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She names what the few publishers who effectively diversified their staffs did so: by tying news managers’ raises and bonuses, in part at least, to the rates of minority hiring and retention. She is frank in her evaluation of the National Association of Black Journalists, calling it “toothless” except for its professional training programs.

Learning From the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer, by John Maher (self-published 2011). I don’t remember how I heard of my neighbor’s book but the title intrigued me: what can we learn from the Sixties? He grew up with an Irish-background poor to riches businessman father, which gave him some economic leeway to devote much of his life to organizing. He was an organizer of SDS, Vietnam Summer, Neighbor to Neighbor, and also taught in the Somerville and Boston schools. He was involved in the Progressive Labor Party, but eventually left it, considering it a cult. His FBI file is 2000 pages long (maybe in part because his brother was an open Communist Party member). To organize lower-income people, he decided to work in a Cambridge rubber manufacturing plant, but left because it felt inauthentic to hide his Harvard background. Each chapter ends with a list of principles/practices he learned in each organizing effort. He is frank about the mistakes he made, but also clear about one-on-one, door-to-door, in-person dialogue that he sees essential. I may have been one of the people he recruited to go door-to-door to rally opposition to the Vietnam War (and later to get rent controlled passed in Cambridge, although I don’t remember him, which fits one or his campaign organizing principles – to listen more than direct.

My Dyslexia, by Philip Schultz. This Pulitzer Prize winning poet describes growing up being assumed, and believing himself, to be dumb: it was not until he was 58, when his 2nd grade son was diagnosed with dyslexia, that he realized that he too was dyslexic. He describes how his non-diagnosis led to him acting out, to covering in many ways, to loving books but disliking reading, to discovering ways to teach writing (he created a Writers Studio). Ironically, his publisher, Norton, seems to have a disability, as well: it let slip a misspelling (dyslexia) and a blurb implying that he won a Nobel Prize in science rather than poetry. Gail Mazur loaned me this book (she knows the author).

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver (1998). A novel whose narrator shifts between five female characters, a Rashomon-like format that fascinates me. A fundamentalist Baptist minister takes his four daughters to an isolated village in the Congo, just as the Belgian colonizers (who used to cut off the hands of mineworkers who didn’t meet quota) hand over control. The people have just elected Patrice Lumumba, who the U.S. soon after arranges to be killed. The saga goes from 1959 to the 80s. It’s an excoriating vision of clueless, ineffectual Christian missionaries, of racial prejudice that personal interactions (except in the father’s case) break down, of individual women whose talents and goals and thoughts remain largely unsaid, but are eventually fulfilled. I wanted to finish the 530 page book by the end of our stay, so I raced through the last 100 pages, but the rich portrayal of each person’s experience and of the dynamics and consequences of colonialism will stay with me. Kingsolver funded (until recently, through the National Writers Union’s Service Organization) the Bellwether Prize: $25,000 plus publication of a fiction mss. with social justice themes.

Lone Holdout: A Memoir, by Linda Cox (Charles Street Press, 2010). Cox worked in the editorial department of an unnamed Boston publisher for 12 years, but after a successful class action sex discrimination case in which she was one of five named plaintiffs, she became co-owner of a Charles Street (Beacon Hill) bookstore. She describes serving on a jury for the first time and becoming the one jurist who doubted the prosecutions’ police witnesses. The book goes through the testimony, noting her questions and doubts. On trial was a young Dominican immigrant, charged with selling drugs and weapons violations. Her refusal to convict caused a hung jury: the young man was then retried and convicted. Convinced of the imprisoned man’s innocence, she rounded up pro bono lawyers and raised money to pay for private detectives. A judge finally granted a motion for a new trial, based on documentation of exculpatory evidence, and the inherent unreliability of single-witness identification cases. The arresting officer was proved to be a rogue cop who had been the subject of 27 internal investigations (for brutality, extorting money and sex from drug dealers and their girlfriends, etc.). He was convicted of attempted extortion and larceny and got a 4-6 year prison term. Cox is honest about the young man she defended: after 18 months in prison, he couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. After taking a ride with someone who had drugs in car, he was sent to prison for a year and then deported to Dominican Republic. This case happened in 1988: it took Cox 20 years to write the book, which was almost made into the film, but in the end was self-published. I read self-published books by people I know because I like to make up my mind about their quality, and not react to mainstream-media hype. And I was proved right: her independently published book was chosen to be listed in Publishers Weekly new (as of last year) self-publishing section (25-pgs long) and one of 25 reviewed by Publishers Weekly!

Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, by Amy Alexander (Beacon Press, 2011). Alexander used to live in Cambridge: I read her the book she co-wrote with Dr. Alvin Poussaint on African Americans and suicide, Lay My Burden Down. She wrote for the San Francisco Examiner while still in college, risked danger to cover the 1991 L.A. “riots” for the Sacramento Bee, only to have a copyeditor insert “savage” and “rampaging” into her otherwise carefully reported article. She later writes for the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She names what the few publishers who effectively diversified their staffs did so: by tying news managers’ raises and bonuses, in part at least, to the rates of minority hiring and retention. She is frank in her evaluation of the National Association of Black Journalists, calling it “toothless” except for its professional training programs.

Learning From the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer, by John Maher (self-published 2011). I don’t remember how I heard of my neighbor’s book but the title intrigued me: what can we learn from the Sixties? He grew up with an Irish-background poor to riches businessman father, which gave him some economic leeway to devote much of his life to organizing. He was an organizer of SDS, Vietnam Summer, Neighbor to Neighbor, and also taught in the Somerville and Boston schools. He was involved in the Progressive Labor Party, but eventually left it, considering it a cult. His FBI file is 2000 pages long (maybe in part because his brother was an open Communist Party member). To organize lower-income people, he decided to work in a Cambridge rubber manufacturing plant, but left because it felt inauthentic to hide his Harvard background. Each chapter ends with a list of principles/practices he learned in each organizing effort. He is frank about the mistakes he made, but also clear about one-on-one, door-to-door, in-person dialogue that he sees essential. I may have been one of the people he recruited to go door-to-door to rally opposition to the Vietnam War (and later to get rent controlled passed in Cambridge, although I don’t remember him, which fits one or his campaing organizing principles – to listen more than direct.

My Dyslexia, by Philip Schultz. This Pulitzer Prize winning poet describes growing up being assumed, and believing himself, to be dumb: it was not until he was 58, when his 2nd grade son was diagnosed with dyslexia, that he realized that he too was dyslexic. He describes how his non-diagnosis led to him acting out, to covering in many ways, to loving books but disliking reading, to discovering ways to teach writing (he created a Writers Studio). Ironically, his publisher, Norton, seems to have a disability, as well: it let slip a misspelling (dyslexia) and a blurb implying that he won a Nobel Prize in science rather than poetry. Gail Mazur loaned me this book (she knows the author).

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. I finally read this 1998 Kingsolver novel (and an earlier one, as well) but soon put it down — who knows why. This time it grabbed me, in part because the narrators alternated between five female characters, a Rashomon-like format that fascinates me. A fundamentalist Baptist minister takes his four daughters to an isolated village in the Congo, just as the Belgian colonizers (who used to cut off mineworkers’ hands if they didn’t meet quota) hand over control, and the people elect Patrice Lumumba, who the U.S. soon after arranges to be killed. The saga goes from 1959 to the 80s. It’s an excoriating vision of clueless, ineffectual Christian missionaries, of racial prejudice that personal interactions (except in the father’s case) break down, of individual women whose talents and goals and thoughts remain largely unsaid, but are eventually fulfilled. I wanted to finish the 530 page book by the end of our stay, so I raced through the last 100 pages, but the rich portrayal of each person’s experience and of the dynamics and consequences of colonialism will stay with me. Kingsolver funded (until recently, through the National Writers Union’s Service Organization) the Bellwether Prize: $25,000 plus publication of a fiction mss. with social justice themes.

Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, by Amy Alexander (Beacon Press, 2011). Alexander used to live in Cambridge: I read her the book she co-wrote with Dr. Alvin Poussaint on African Americans and suicide, Lay My Burden Down. She wrote for the San Francisco Examiner while still in college, risked danger to cover the 1991 L.A. “riots” for the Sacramento Bee, only to have a copyeditor insert “savage” and “rampaging” into her otherwise carefully reported article. She later writes for the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She names what the few publishers who effectively diversified their staffs did so: by tying news managers’ raises and bonuses, in part at least, to the rates of minority hiring and retention. She is frank in her evaluation of the National Association of Black Journalists, calling it “toothless” except for its professional training programs.

Learning From the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer, by John Maher (self-published 2011). I don’t remember how I heard of my neighbor’s book but the title intrigued me: what can we learn from the Sixties? He grew up with an Irish-background poor to riches businessman father, which gave him some economic leeway to devote much of his life to organizing. He was an organizer of SDS, Vietnam Summer, Neighbor to Neighbor, and also taught English in the Somerville schools. To organize lower-income people, he worked for awhile in a Cambridge manufacturing plant, but stopped because it felt inauthentic (he hid his Harvard background). Each chapter ends with a list of principles/practices he learned in each organizing effort. He is frank about the mistakes he made, but also clear about one-on-one, door-to-door, in-person dialogue that he sees essential. His FBI file is 2000 pages long (maybe in part because his brother was an open Communist Party member). I may have been one of the people he recruited to go door-to-door to rally opposition to the Vietnam War (and later to get rent controlled passed in Cambridge, although I don’t remember him.

Lone Holdout: A Memoir, by Linda Cox (Charles Street Press, 2010). Cox worked in the editorial department of an unnamed Boston publisher for 12 years, but after a successful class action sex discrimination case in which she was one of five named plaintiffs, she became co-owner of a Charles Street (Beacon Hill) bookstore. She describes serving on a jury for the first time and becoming the one jurist who doubted the prosecutions’ police witnesses. The book goes through the testimony, noting her questions and doubts. On trial was a young Dominican immigrant, charged with selling drugs and weapons violations. Her refusal to convict caused a hung jury: the young man was then retried and convicted. Convinced of the imprisoned man’s innocence, she rounded up pro bono lawyers and raised money to pay for private detectives. A judge finally granted a motion for a new trial, based on documentation of exculpatory evidence, and the inherent unreliability of single-witness identification cases. The arresting officer was proved to be a rogue cop who had been the subject of 27 internal investigations (for brutality, extorting money and sex from drug dealers and their girlfriends, etc.). He was convicted of attempted extortion and larceny and got a 4-6 year prison term. Cox is honest about the young man she defended: after 18 months in prison, he couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. After taking a ride with someone who had drugs in car, he was sent to prison for a year and then deported to Dominican Republic. This case happened in 1988: it took Cox 20 years to write the book, which was almost made into the film, but in the end was self-published. I read self-published books by people I know because I like to make up my mind about their quality, and not react to mainstream-media hype.

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka (Knopf, 2011) another 2011 National Book Award fiction finalist. It, too, is written unconventionally: in the first person plural (“We”). I doubted this would work in a novel, but it does. This the story of “picture brides” brought from Japan to the U.S. early in the 20th century, by Japanese men seeking wives. The “we” form lets us see their commonality but also to appreciate their diversity, and their individual ways of coping.

A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle. Jon and I both read this raucus novel while we were in Dublin. [Jon “It gave me a real feeling for what life in Dublin was like, and fit what I saw there”]. Henry and his brother Victor are street urchins whose one-legged assassin dad and crazy, alcoholic mother, had more kids than they can care for. The boys turn to robbery and are eventually recruited into Michael Collins’ revolutionaries. They take part in the Post Office rebellion against the British, and then face retaliation. Jon will read another in Doyle’s novel series on our post-Christmas reading weekend.

The Irish Famine, by Peter Grey (Thames & Hudson). This book was an eye-opener: the Irish Famine was not just a matter of a failed potato harvest, as I had always thought. The famine could have been averted if farmers were allowed to grow other crops but the British plantation owners insisted that they export all non-potato foods to Britain, while 1 million Irish died of starvation and sickness, and another 1 million fled the county for the U.S., cutting Ireland’s population in half and leading to a long period of poverty, which may have affected my great-grandmother, Winifred Flanagan Moore, born in 1850 in Mayo County.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Reb ecca Skloot (Crown, 2010). Scientists have been using “HeLa” cells since the 1950s. This is the story of an African American woman whose cells, after she died of cervical cancer, were reproduced by scientists who went on to develop the polio vaccine and other medical advances. This was before informed consent regulations, so it’s also the history of bad scientific/medical practices, especially towards people of color, an example of scientists’ incompetence at communicating with non-scientists, and the story of Lacks’ daughter’s determined to understand the science her mother’s cells were part of, and to have that contribution honored.

Nemesis, by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). A short novel set in New Jersey and in the Poconos of Pennsylvania. It made me understand the epidemic that caused our mother to make us wear gloves whenever we went to “the city” and to take us to the country – not just for fun but to keep us safe. The novel also shows how polio victim “cripples’ were hidden away and how suspected “carriers” were shunned.

Knowing Jesse: A Mother’s Story of Grief, Grace, and Everyday Bliss, by Marianne Leone (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The author spoke about her memoir at a National Writers Union program. What impressed me was the ferocity of her love and determination that her son Jesse, born with cerebral palsy, which left him paraplegic, subject to seizures and unable to speak, be recognized as smart, talented, and capable to being mainstreamed at school, where he excelled at both Latin and poetry. The author is married to the actor, Chris Cooper (they live in our area).

Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care, by Augustus A. White III, M.D. , with David Chanoff (Harvard University Press, 2011). Dr. White is Professor of Medical Education and Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the first African American department chief at Harvard’s teaching hospitals. He shows how unconscious bias persists and leads to gender, race and age health disparities. He reports double-blind studies: one in which when men and women report similar heart symptoms and stresses in their lives, doctors are more likely to believe that the men had organize heart disease but that the women’s stress was due to psychological disorders. Another: doctors in hospitals call white patients Mr. or Mrs. and draw curtains to protect their privacy during breast exams, but those same doctors call Black patients by their first names and do not bother to draw privacy curtains. Dr. White also describes bias he faced in the course of his career.

Finding Oprah’s Roots – Finding Your Own, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Crown, 2007) I just finished this fascinating account (also shown on TV) of the search for Oprah’s ancestors, via documents and DNA. It made me realize the significance for African Americans of recovering – and honoring – and being inspired by – ancestors who managed to get an education, buy land, and build careers, despite the barriers of legal and interpersonal racism. It made me want to know more about my ancestors: to find inspiring models among them.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander (New Press, 2010). Alexander was a keynote speaker at an anti-racism conference I attended. She documents how President Reagan’s “War on Drugs” targeted communities of color and put enormous numbers of Blacks and Latinos in prison: how prosecutors pile on charges to get these men to accept guilty pleas in exchange for shorter jail time, not telling them that once they get out, a felony charge will prevent them from getting jobs, form voting (in many states), from food stamps, from public housing, from getting licenses in many professions, from serving on juries, from educational opportunities.

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, by Gail Collins (Back Bay Books, 2010). A book about what it for women in the 60s, when stewardesses got fired if they married or aged; when Radcliffe’s male president told students: your education will prepare you to be “splendid wives and mothers”; when doctors who found a breast malignancy asked husbands to sign the permission to operate “because women were too emotionally and irrationally tied to their breasts.” And about ground-breakers who challenged those views.

Let’s Get Real: What People of Color Can’t Say & Whites Won’t Ask About Racism, by Lee Mun Wah. Community therapist and documentary filmmaker ( “The Color of Fear” and “If These Halls Could Talk”) collected a range of responses to questions he asked people of color (eg: “What would you say to whites if you could tell them the truth about racism?”) and questions he asked white people (eg. “What are some of the things you are afraid to say to people of color?”). I’m one of the people he quotes. www.stiryfryseminars.com

It has been a while since I have wanted to let this out. But it took me five extended plane journeys back and forth to USA, before I could put pen to paper.

At this point, I have made my home in several airports on forty eight hour journeys, living sleeping and feeding myself in a manner not unlike Hanks in The Terminal. Long before that, I’d d acquired the practiced ease of a frequent traveler, and if my parents lived in the era of frequent flyer miles, or if Indian Railways decided to honor loyal patrons, I would inherit a fortune of discounts. But this is the story of the woman of color flying abroad.

Warmth and welcome have greeted me on foreign shores, in friends who have loved and cherished me as part of a community that I was not born or naturalized into, in colleagues who have welcomed my difference with respectful interest, and in graduate classes brimming with motivating conversations about racist discrimination. Yet my experience of international travel has remained unsettling territory. It has loomed large almost as a rite of passage that I have to endure every single time I cross the Atlantic. I feel somehow — out of shape.

Of course, I have met countless gregarious airport staff, cheerful crew members, and helpful immigration officials. In fact my very first immigration officer, who looked at me over his scary eyeglasses, gave me a little tip about what not to miss in the Hawkeye-Cyclone football face-offs. I have been rescued from despairing situations by the most proactive security officers, and ushered into closest-to-comfort seats by concerned air hostesses.

Yet, I cannot but revisit today the discolorations under the corners of my glittering eiderdown. Quiet moments of initial shame and later contemplation, nudge me into discomfort. Especially that very first time when I did not know what my ‘first port of entry’ required of me.

Now, as my Mom would regretfully vouch, I am a very quick person. I jump through hoops of possible responses even before I am expected to begin articulating a reply. I run in rapid short steps and am averse to holding up the world for any reason that could conceivably be attributed to me. Nevertheless, I realized that first time I stepped into USA, that the Customs and Border Protection – the CBC – was the eccentric professor of times bygone who expected nothing short of intuitive genius. Well then, perfection thy name was me! I was being my usual efficient self, carefully scrutinizing videos that prepared me to face the formidable customs staff, even while I was queuing to walk up to the Immigration Officer. And I glided through the scary interview effortlessly. I even made my Immigration officer chat about football! I could frog-leap into the blues and do a little self-congratulatory somersault! Life was beautiful. I was fitting in just fine.

But then came the moment of reckoning. I had collected my heavy checked-in bags and was on my way now to reroute them onto my domestic US flight to my final destination. I had been trained on how this ritual had to be performed at the ‘first port of entry’. My heavy bags had been loaded onto a cart.

I was scuttling smoothly with these toward what seemed to me like security channels where they would be rerouted. Two well-dressed officials awaited my arrival . I halted with my cart. With a contorted body gesture I was trying to communicate my need of help to unload the bags for their rerouting. The gentlemen at the security channel looked at my clueless visage and then at each other. With what sounded like a suppressed guffaw, they resumed their disbelieving gaze at me. One of them said, “You’re good.” Figuring that he meant I could leave my checked baggage and move on toward my final flight, I prepared to deposit my heavy bags with what would have been some herculean effort. The man interrupted me with a snigger.

I stopped dead in my tracks. It seemed I had done something — something terrible and irredeemable. I prepared to clarify, first looking back to make sure that I was holding nobody up with my faux-pas. Thankfully, my histrionics did not have an audience. I ventured a stutter, “I thought this was where I check my baggage in again for my final destination….” I swallowed the rest of the words. “We are not the flight people. We are the CBP…” — the haughty grumble rolled into hilarity. What was previously a laugh, now grew into a snort, twisted into a hoot , and erupted as a cackle: “Now THAT’S a first one!” His companion nodded in merry assent.

So I was one in a long line of similarly clueless souls, foreign to the occult codes of airports, passing the limbo into the grand American dream. Bowing my head at what seemed to be a disgraceful beginning to my process of ‘cultural acclimatization,’ I walked away with my cartload of bags. My eyes welled up as I cursed my careless self, “Stupid, STUPID me.”

I write today, exactly two and a half years and fifteen international planes later. Such self-reproach has resounded within me on my several phases of international travel since. Sometimes even for my excessive friendliness such as when I smiled widely to another such security official and asked, “So is this where I go for my security check?” He looked me in the face with a smile not quite resembling my own and chortled, “Yeah baby, this is where you go baby, yeah baby…” Unable to fathom an appropriately outraged response, I hurried on for my flight.

I have revisited this string of words time and again to make sense of it. As I walked past the security channel that day, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a sturdy, serious–looking American gentleman glide past the officer with the grace of a magnificent swan. The officer did little else except to politely nod at him. Once again, my sense of inadequacy drowned my eyes in watery silence.

Of course, a friendly smiling face at a Starbucks counter, and the sumptuous sandwich accompanying it, rescued me from losing myself in oblivion. There is, I guess, something to be said for progressive capitalism that lets you buy your way out of insult with a Frappuccino and injury with a muffin.

Here is a story by Marianna Sommerfeld, a retired social worker who lives in Cambridge, MA. She wrote it when she was 85 years old.

 “They call them pickanninies,” my parents said, in love with a new word and in love with our new country. We had been watching some Black children at play. Newly arrived in New York, we had come from Germany at a time – before World War II – when the two continents had little knowledge of each other. None of us had ever seen a Black person, and it didn’t occur to us that ‘pickannny” could be a word offensive to Black people. We settled in Scarsdale, an all-white suburb, and gave no further thought to Blacks.

I remember only two Black students in college, although Smith, to use the lingo of the time, was considered “good about taking Negroes.” One of the two, who had an outstanding academic record, couldn’t pass a swimming test, which at that time was required; it was said that “they” simply couldn’t learn to swim. Much later I would run into the other Black women, waiting for the ferry to the Vineyard. She recognized me, I didn’t recognize her, and this happened again the next year. She paid me back: ‘Oh, so you’re a social worker now? You’re meeting unmet needs?” “We don’t talk like that any more,” I said. I still cringe when I think about this encounter.

I had always thought of myself as a good white liberal, without racial prejudice. I learned about my own racism in the seventies, when the Boston schools were being desegregated. I was working at a mental health clinic in East Boston; a community group had asked for mental health consultation. With this group I went to meetings with parents, with teachers and principals, and with politicians. Rather smugly I wrote in my diary some of the comments I heard from other good white liberals; “ I am tired of hearing about slavery,” “If they want better schools why don’t they hire better teachers?” I also found myself describing a biracial parents’ meeting thus: ‘Then the Black mothers came in, pushing and shoving each other, and giggling.” A friend pointed out the condescending tone of my descriptions. I might as well have been writing about Little Black Sambo.

It’s easy to be unaware of one’s own condescension. We see this when men condescend to women without knowing what they’re doing. “They should stop complaining now that they have everything they want,” say people unaware of the daily slights, the daily put-downs Black people still encounter – in school, at work, in the marketplace.

As a child, I was taught a little English ditty:

Jimbo Jim was cast away, Upon a desert isle

The ‘habitants they liked his ways, They liked his Irish smile

A desert isle with “habitants”? I’m guessing the islanders were dark-skinned and so didn’t quite count. I don’t know who taught me this song. It seems strange, now, that I was taught it, since I didn’t learn English until I came to this country. But I think of it from time to time. Like many Whites I grew up with habits of mind that are difficult to get rid of. They are part of the baggage we carry.