Do What You Love

I think I’ve mentioned before that I get up early on the weekends (and I’ll be honest, mostly because my dog wakes up early) and make coffee and sit and read.

Tomorrow, I’ll be doing much of the same.

But! I’ll also be preparing for an anti-racist book club I host.

For this meeting, we’re reading Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” (which I also think I’ve mentioned before).

Here are some striking things I’ve learned in my reading of the book so far:

1. The Nazi’s designed their own Blood Laws—the laws they used to define who was Jewish and, therefore, who could be stripped of their humanity entirely—on America’s miscegenation laws.
   
   But, they stopped short of America’s “one drop rule.”
   

   Wilkerson tells us: “While the Nazi’s praised ‘the American commitment to legislating racial purity,’ they could not abide ‘the unforgiving hardness’ under which ‘an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks,’ Whitman wrote.’ The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”

2. The brutality of lynchings in the South during Jim Crow was not new to me. I was aware photographers were present, too.

   What I didn’t know, ashamedly so, was that lynching photos were often turned into postcards that were mailed so frequently they became a sub-department of the postcard industry.
   
   Wilkerson again: “They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come to human beings in modern times. Some people framed the postcards with locks of the victim’s hair under the glass if they had been able to secure any.”

   
   Finally, in 1908, the U.S. postmaster banned the cards from being mailed, but people were so tied to the practice they just started putting the postcards in envelopes.

3. Henry Fonda was a 14-year-old boy helping his father at his printing press when he witnessed the brutal murder of Will Brown by an angry mob of white supremacists who lynched him, shot at his hanging body, and then tied his corpse to a police car and dragged his body through the streets.

Tell me—what are you going to do today?