Reading books that make me feel uncomfortable for all the right reasons

I've been grappling with the criticism in some circles that being "woke" is undesirable. Why would any educated person think it's a bad idea to be aware of what others go through on a daily basis? Why is it "woke" to read about what happened to others [POC, women, children, Indigenous people ... fill in the blank] in history books or for those history textbooks to correct misinformation as new information comes to light? I've come to a recent observation that the critique comes from people who don't want to put in the work to learn about unpleasant and uncomfortable truths. 

Don and I recently finished the Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book by Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, which examines the great migration out of southern states when six million Black Americans left their homes for locations in the North and West starting in 1915 and continuing until 1970. The book is organized around the lives of three of these migrants: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, who fled Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who had to leave Florida for Harlem in 1945 in fear for his life; and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of being able to use all of his medical skills in California. 

The book, published in 2010, clearly took Wilkerson years to compile. She conducted a series of extensive interviews with the three protagonists over many years so she was able to give readers a very complete profile of their lives before, during, and after they migrated. By focusing on three individual stories Wilkerson was able to show aspects of life in the South which led to the need/desire to move and the migration routes which generally followed train lines. After conducting over 1000 interviews and doing a deep dive into a broad swath of research on the migration, Wilkerson was able to dispel the many misconceptions that transplanted Blacks were more uncouth, ignorant, and impoverished than the Black people who were already in the northern cities. Extensive scholarship shows them to be more like immigrants from Europe, who arrived in the new land ready to work hard, improve their economic conditions, and ready to assimilate into their new land.

The Warmth of Other Suns wasn't an easy book to read, both Don and I agreed. The stories of terrible inequality and unfair treatment of Blacks, where ever they lived, was depressing and maddening. Typically we can listen to hours of audiobooks on long car trips without pausing. Not so with this book. The stories kept hitting us like gut punches and we would have to take breaks from listening as we digested the new information. Fortunately we were together so we could stop and talk to work through our feelings. It was hard work but we were learning and waking up. It took us over a month of listening, an hour here, an hour there for a total of 22+ hours. When we finished we both were very glad we read the book, but relieved we were done. I rated the book with 4 stars for the above reasons. Don rated the book with 4 stars for its content and 3 stars for entertainment value. Like I said, it was hard work reading this book and most people want to enjoy what they read. Isn't that fair?

A week after we finished The Warmth of Other Suns I found myself reading Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe, as part of the Goodreads Summer Challenge. It is set in the South Side of Chicago in the late 1990s during the process of dismantling the housing projects built to accommodate many of the migrant Blacks who made their way to the city in the 1930s and 40s. By the 90s people living in these projects found themselves crammed together in inhospitable conditions, beset by the crack-cocaine epidemic, and overrun by rival gangs. The story is told by a 12-year-old girl who loses all her friends, and nearly loses her brother, in this one fateful summer. It is a heartbreaking story, though the girl makes it out of the projects with help from a special teacher and her church. But like the previous book, I found reading Last Summer on State Street was hard work. It gave me an updated look at other effects of the Great Migration, too. 

I am never upset when I learn something new from a book, even if I find it difficult to read. My discomfort is, after all, helping me to become more "woke" and hopefully a better antiracist. My rating of this book was 4 stars.

Challenges: 20 books of Summer (#26 & #27); Big Book Summer (640 pages); Audiobooks with Don; and Goodreads Summer Challenge (11/11).

-Anne