Xmas reading part 1 of 2

Always over Xmas break I try to read a whole bunch of shorter books that I own. A few weeks before break, i choose whatever I want to read, and then really try to get them all done. They tend to be Short and books that I know I will enjoy w/ little problem (I am of the sort that actually reads books that I really really don't really want to - but there are so many aspects of life that i wish to know more, i force myself to pursue them.

So, this xmas break, i chose these books, plus one more that i did not get to. Seven books over 16 days (plus I was reading others - I also finished three more and about 15 manga - but they all were not part of the project):

Gather together in my Name
and
Singin' and swingin' and gettin' merry like Christmas

by Maya Angelou

I absolutely love reading bio's of African Americans. There is a lot to be learned where growing up I never knew - America is such a big place, and it encompasses so many different sorts of people here. And -this is what I learned - that America had different ways of treating its citizens. So, a particular fetish for reading 921's (bios) of African Americans is mine. Started w/ Autobio. of Malcom X. , continues to this day. I'd read Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings a few years back and loved it - but never read the next volume of her series until now. It was so good that I then had to read the third volume in the series. So, included in my list of books is one - Singin' and swingin' - that i hadn't planned to read. She's had a stunningly hard life, but she hit it when she got on a touring company of Porgy and Bess in Europe. Rome, Milan, Paris - even Zagreb- she hit all the cities. I was particularly struck by this passage:

"...Europeans often made as clear a distinction between Black and white Americans as did the most confirmed Southern bigot. The difference, I was to discover, was that more often than not, Blacks were liked, whereas whites Americans were not" (1954, written 1976)

Why this passage- one I didn't even really dwell too much upon when I first read it? Because another 'bio' of a black American was ...

Holler if you hear me

by Michael Eric Dyson

This was his work on Tupac Shakur. Don't know too much about Tupac - I read this book because I love Dyson. You may have seen Dyson on TV - Bill Maher used to be a stomping ground of his. But I knew him because when he was a prof @ De Paul, he used to have a weekly column in the Sun Times. It was a real treat. Since I don't know too much on Tupac, I got a kid to cut me a bunch of his work. Still waiting - it was on friday and she hasn't gotten them to me yet.

But - an interesting few lines below to be compared with the lines above. Timeline again? Maya wrote in 1976 - and Dyson wrote in 2001. The twenty years talked about in the Dyson piece takes that time line to 1981.

'And the great great great grandchildren of slaves who fought to be free and who hoped that their seed would escape rather than embrace enslavement create the images that destroy our standing in society. "Thanks to music videos, the image people all over the world now have of African Americans is of violence prone misogynists, preoccupied with promiscuous sex and conspicuous consumption," says writer Khephra Burns. "Despite years of striving to distance ourselves from the negative ways in which white folk once portrayed us, we have come at last to the point of portraying ourselves to the world in this way." Stanley Crouch sees an even more sinister effect of the relentless negative and stereotypical portrayal of blacks. "You can talk to people who have travelled around the world, and they'll tell you the contempt that has developed for black people over the last twenty years is mightily imposing," he says. "You and I might have a completely different experience, but if we were in our early twenties, that's another vibration. People would say, "uh-oh, here they come,' and people would be suspicious and cross the street. That's going on all over the world." p.111