Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “racism”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, by Matthew Harris
- kudos:I’ve read a number of books on Mormonism and race, but this one might be the most compelling. Its focus on the 20th century is important, and it has the most thorough discussion of the 1978 lifting of the priesthood and temple ban that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to see all these details in one place, but I’m grateful that Harris made that available to readers.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
- kudos:I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series earlier this week and decided to give the book a try. It’s a quick listen, though I probably should have read it to really lean into the metafictional aspects. Weird in all the right ways and got me thinking.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Great War: American Front, by Harry Turtledove
- kudos:I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting. The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Rep. Clay Higgins Posts, Then Deletes, Racist Comments About Haitians'
- kudos:Posting this as a bookmark. It’s mindboggling how overtly racist this is—and how much work the GOP will do to dismiss it as nothing. I want to be able to return back to this in the weeks and months to come, to remind myself and others just how bad things are. gift link link to “Rep. Clay Higgins Posts, Then Deletes, Racist Comments About Haitians”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Boone County High School alum still fighting for school to drop the ‘Rebels’ as mascot'
- kudos:I went to BCHS and was on speech and debate with Akilah. I was one of those naïve white kids who didn’t really register all of the problematic parts of our mascot, and I have regrets. I’ll be interested to listen to this podcast and do some more internal work. link to “Boone County High School alum still fighting for school to drop the ‘Rebels’ as mascot”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy
- kudos:This book took a while to finally get through. After two failed attempts at an ebook, I finally succeeded thanks to a LibriVox audiobook! I have mixed feelings about the book, though I ultimately liked it. Tolstoy’s ideas are radical, and though I aspire to a certain radicalism in my faith and politics, that is certainly not my nature, so I brought some resistance with me into the text. Even accounting for that, though, I don’t think Tolstoy’s argument is as self-evident or well reasoned as he thinks it is.
40 books that have shaped my faith
- kudos:A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
- kudos:I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book, and I’ve also enjoyed its BBC television and radio adaptations a lot. The first time I read it, I didn’t get it, the second time I loved it, and this time I see why it’s such a classic. It was fun to read the original after watching and listening to the adaptations pretty regularly over the past several years. Le Carré does well with detail, and I’d forgotten the subplots and side comments that get left out—but that add so much to the characters, the plot, and the overall feel of the book.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Blacksad, by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido
- kudos:I stumbled upon this series on TVTropes and was happy to see it’s available through Hoopla. I get why it gets the praise that it does, but it just didn’t land with me. The art is gorgeous and the premise (a noir detective in a 1950s America populated by anthropomorphic animals) is bold and compelling. I don’t know that noir is my genre, though—it feels more like tropes strung together than an actual plot, and it sometimes goes out of its way to be lurid.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'In WWII, a segregated U.S. Army deployed to fight Hitler — and brought Jim Crow : NPR'
- kudos:I had never heard about this story before. It’s tempting to think of World War II as “a good war,” but stories like this complicate it. How is this blatant racism compatible with fighting against the Nazis? link to ‘In WWII, a segregated U.S. Army deployed to fight Hitler — and brought Jim Crow : NPR’
the problem with Gadianton robber rhetoric
- kudos:After recently finishing an excellent biography on Brigham Young, I’m starting to make my way through some other Mormon Studies books that I own but have not yet read. This has brought me to Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. It’s very good so far, and I regret having waited until now to read it. I’m currently working through Reeve’s chapters describing Mormons’ relationship with American Indians, and I just now read a paragraph that really surprised me.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Why Race Is Still A Problem In Dungeons & Dragons'
- kudos:Good article on an important subject. I may have to assign this to my students next semester! link to ‘Why Race Is Still A Problem In Dungeons & Dragons’
- kudos:
Currently reading John Turner’s excellent biography of Brigham Young, and I keep wanting to highlight passages and then send them to Brad Wilcox.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A BYU fan repeatedly called Duke volleyball player a racial slur during match in Utah, family says'
- kudos:BYU is really on a roll this week. link to ‘A BYU fan repeatedly called Duke volleyball player a racial slur during match in Utah, family says’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Lexington KY looking to address more crime, safety issues | Lexington Herald Leader'
- kudos:These numbers sound great, but what cost are we paying? I’m not talking about the $70,000, I’m talking about the hard to quantify costs of surveillance—which, as the ACLU of KY points out, are likely to disproportionately target communities of color. Except we can’t know that because the city won’t tell us where the cameras are. link to ‘Lexington KY looking to address more crime, safety issues | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'What the Latter-day Saint hymn ‘Love at Home’ has to do with blackface'
- kudos:So, so many wild things in this article. I grew up loving this hymn and had no idea it had roots in blackface minstrelsy. Hope the Church will take it out of its next hymnbook, but I’m not holding my breath. The real kicker is Brigham Young’s concern about blackface—not because it’s racist but because it’s degrading to white people. link to ‘What the Latter-day Saint hymn ‘Love at Home’ has to do with blackface’
Dallin Oaks and Marjorie Taylor Greene on heterosexual extinction
- kudos:Thanks to a recommendation from BoingBoing, I just finished reading a Business Insider article describing a recent video in which Marjorie Taylor Greene: predicted that identifying as heterosexual will be a thing of the past within a period of less than 200 years thanks to LGBTQ-inclusive sex educators, who she called “trans terrorists.” More specifically, Greene was quoted as saying that heterosexual extinction would come about “probably in about four or five generations.