Prompts for Second Session

Prompts for Second Session

1.  I was struck particularly by Stevenson’s noting several times, the effect arrests and murders have on the surrounding community (112).  I mean I get it, but in my White mind, bad things happen.  People are picked up by the police, jailed, and adjudicated.  In my White world this seems to happen as it should.  

Not so with the Black lives in Stevenson’s world, both his world as a writer and his world as a Black man.  The effects of domestic terrorism by the Klan during the Jim Crow years, manifested by public lynchings and other forms of night-riding murder must be replicating itself through Black neighborhoods today.  remember Emmet Till?  What do you think about the rise in police murders and the overflowing numbers of Black Americans filling our jails as being nothing more than a third wave of determined oppression of Black America, eased and focused by Supreme Court rulings that make it all okay? 

2.  How is it possible that in America, we can have stories like those of Ian (152), Trina (148), George (157), and Antonio (154)?  Would our founding fathers have been similarly shocked as we have in reading of their occurrence?  What are your thoughts about the idea that the 3/5 clause of exclusion in our Constitution creates a loophole in our fundamental consciousness as a people that allows an “out” for the “inalienable rights” each one of us is to constitutionally enjoy as an American?  Perhaps our Constitution is the cause of these horrible things our majorities do to our minorities?

3. Ian writes a letter to Bryan after the report on the plight of children in the United States was published.  He writes the photos and the photo shoot “were a welcome addition to my sensory deprived life.”  Do you have family photographs that raise such emotions in you?  What do the photographs connect to in your psyche that engender feelings similar to those of Ian?  Do you suppose that this is one way Ian is us and we are him?

Session One: How short the generations

I can't shake the realization that Stevenson's grandmother, the person who said to him, "You can't understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan.  You have to get close. (14)" was known so well by him and that her parents were captives of the slave-based economy.   The fact that he mentions her again and again shows the impact she had on his life and the way in which stories move down through families.  I barely knew one grandparent and have no memories of  my other grandparents.  I have no family history, really, besides that which my brother - the family historian - has documented.  He being 6 years older than I has those memories.

I contrast this with the fact that family stories from the time of slavery and Jim Crow must hold great currency in African-American families in America today.  They live with this history in a way I do not.  We certainly didn't sit around talking about the ways we'd oppressed Black Folk in this country.  I do remember my Dad referring to the men who waited on him at the Union League Club in NYC as the "boys," men in the fifties and sixties I'm sure.  And he did it as a matter of course, not meaning to be derisive.  It was just the way things were.

No wonder W.E.B. DuBois referred to the double consciousness Black Americans needed to survive when he wrote Souls Of The Black Folk in 1903, the year my Dad was born.  Without it, you could die rapidly, not grasping how the Whites that surrounded you, perceived you.  For me, living freely in the dominant culture, I was safe.  It didn't make any difference.  And that's the way I was raised.

What Grandma said to Bryan was part of his education to stay alive.  I also wonder if it is part of his belief that "it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace".  I know I do.  And I believe without ongoing direct (close) dialogue with Black Americans,  I'll never get there.

Shouldn't we stop reading books and start talking across racial lines?

Introduction to Blog

Montgomery Alabama 1965

A small group at CCP is reading and discussing Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy.  I thought I would create a blog to facilitate commentary and discussion of the readings.  This is a book that seems to have struck deeply into our sense of social justice, what place mass incarceration has in America, the continuing havoc latent and overt racism continues to have upon us all, and the effect of our contemporary political landscape on our sensibilities to understand, empathize with, and get along with one another.

I hope members of the group (you) will join in and enrich our discussion by asking questions, offering comments, sharing thoughts that percolated to the surface in the hours after our meetings.  I've offered a comment for session one and hope I can entice you to offering a response or your own comment.

Thanks,
CR



Here's two links to Bryan Stevenson:  TED Talk and PBS extended interview.

And one to The Davis Sisters Singing  "Plant My Feet On Higher Ground"