Formative Texts
The texts that I have selected for this assignment represent not simply works that have taught me about the world, but more so texts that have completely challenged my idea of what I held to be true. These texts made their impact by showing me just how wrong some of my initial assumptions about the world have been. Of the thousands of pages that I have read during my years at Hamline, these are the texts that I find myself thinking about almost every day. These are the texts that really made me a social justice thinker and worker.
A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota; Edited by Sun Yung Shin, 2016
This beautiful and provocative collection of personal narratives was probably the first of all of these texts that I read in my collegiate experience, and certainly had one of the earliest impacts on my learning. As an idealistic sophomore, I thought, like many other progressive liberal whites, that Minnesota was uniquely above the rest of the upper midwest; I had always considered this state as being a bastion of anti-racism and equal opportunity. This book gathers the stories of people of color living in Minnesota, providing a space for the unaltered truth. In presenting many different perspectives ranging from immigrant narratives to the realities of interracial adoption, this collection paints an image of Minnesota that is often invisible to those who do not live it. As the facade of “Minnesota nice” politeness politics is stripped away, it becomes more and more evident that there is very much a problem of race affecting the star of the north.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Judith Butler, 1990
As Important as race scholarship has been to my education, gender and sexuality studies was an even earlier foundation to my social justice education. Imposing in both language and concept, Gender Trouble posed to me many challenges to my initial conception of sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler seeks to take a postmodern approach to the idea of gender, arguing that what we see as gender is not an essential trait, but rather a learned performance and way of being. Butler considers gender to not just be a singular script, but rather a series of fluid conceptions of how to act and what certain actions mean given their gendering and the gendered relationship between different actors. In this text, Butler proposes a concept of the “heterosexual matrix” a system of interlocking ideas and norms about sex, sexuality, and gender that promote a rather strict cishet male understanding of the world, particularly in terms of how relationships should take form and what they mean.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?; Beverly Tatum, 2017
While this book has been a relatively recent read for me, it has nonetheless been one of my favorite and most influential books to be introduced to me in the past year. In this text, psychologist and race educator Beverly Tatum takes up the titular question of why it is that black children often isolate themselves in school settings, discussing racial identity development over one's lifetime and the unique formation processes of people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The particular edition that I read and am citing here is the 20th-anniversary edition of the book. This edition includes a 70 page introduction that recaps the racial politics of the United States in the 20 years since its initial publication, something that really helped me reframe how I (a person the same age as the book, who came of age as much of the incidents in the introduction happened) might frame racial politics differently than those who experienced previous racial trends and incidents.
Justice and the Politics of Difference; Iris Marion Young, 1990
If there would be any singular text that I would describe as a personal influence, it would be this book. In this text, Iris Marion Young seeks to deconstruct common notions of justice that focus wholly on a distributive model. Being influenced by the identity politics movements of the second half of the 20th century, Young takes considerable care to look at how group difference is the most important factor when considering that justice looks like, a model of justice based on difference. Young attempts to illustrate a better approach to justice by proposing a foundational construction of injustice through her concept of the “Five Faces of Oppression” (Exploitation, Marginalization, Powerlessness, Violence, and Cultural Imperialism). Young states that the presence of any one the faces of oppression is enough to describe a group as oppresses, and that no singe faces should be held above another. This text was freeing for me as it allowed me to better articulate both how someone may be oppressed, and why this oppression matters in a larger societal context.
Donald Trump is the First White President; Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017
This piece of writing differs considerably from other selections in two ways. First, it is a far more accessible read, and second, it takes as much influence from social science as it does from Coates’ background in the humanities, making it as gripping to read as it is informative. What really draws me to a writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates is the passionate connection that he has to his writing, seamlessly blending well-researched journalism with gripping personal insights into the world of race in the United States. In this article Coates discusses the fundamental role of white supremacy in American presidencies, contrasting this history with the impact of having an extremely vocal and overtly racist (and White) president after eight years of a historically unprecedented Black presidency. I found this text powerful precisely because it stated the obvious, demonstrating the forces of white supremacy and white privilege in the election of Donald Trump.
The Color of Law; Richard Rothstein, 2017
This book looks at another issue that has always been rather distant from me, both in terms of my conception of history and in how I have noticed it in my life: racial housing segregation. Rothstein not only describes the history of racial housing segregation in excruciating detail, but he also makes an argument that there was nothing inevitable about the unequal outcomes in the United States. Perhaps the most impactful point that is made in this book is that, while segregation is often discussed as being a legal system of oppression in the United States it in many cases was explicitly outlawed by local statutes and in the constitution. This may seem like a rather small detail in the context of all of the racial discrimination of US history, but it helped show me the sort of active attempts that were made to prevent the advancement of the lives of people of color; people were willing to ignore the constitution and stagnant economic development in order to ensure white supremacy in the United States, a trend that has seemingly never stopped.
