adult

I fully intend to return to posting about fun adventure books, but the last couple weeks I’ve been sidetracked by serious, nonfiction books. One of these is Race: A History Beyond Black and White, by Marc Aronson (Atheneum, 2007), which I finished last night.

I have misgivings about the term “required reading”*, so let’s just say I think every American could benefit highly from reading this book. There’s no one alive whose life isn’t touched by issues of race, and too often negatively. Race illuminates the evolution of “race” as a concept humans invented to define and justify their ill treatment of others. While it doesn’t dwell on or offer clear-cut solutions to today’s problems, it gives readers a much deeper understanding of how things came to be.

Aronson traces the path of us v. them mentality in the Western World from primitive tribes through the present, with major stops for the Greek and Roman empires, the rise of Christianity, trans-Atlantic slave trade and immigration, and what he terms the “Age of Racism” (which includes, but is not limited to, American lynch mobs and the Holocaust). You see, “race” as we know it is a human invention of the past three hundred or so years, though it was millennia in the making. Race plainly explains how each new moment of enlightenment, that eliminated one kind of prejudice, gave birth to a newer, harsher form of prejudice.

Aronson writes in a formal but highly readable style. Many chapters open with a teen-friendly comparison of ancient political situations to contemporary teen issues. Snippets of his own family’s history and his admissions of racial prejudice lend a personal quality as well. I’m no race scholar, but it seemed to me that Aronson took a very even-handed approach to the sensitive subject matter. He includes extensive end notes and makes transparent those occasions when his personal opinion veers from those of “the experts.”

Though many parts of this book will make you angry, and many more will make you weep, Aronson ends Race on a hopeful note. “Our history of race leaves us uncertain,” he writes. “We should be proud of that. Our ancestors were less confused and left us the story of prejudice, slavery, and death I have described here.” In other words, as much as humans may be, by nature, prejudiced, if we push through our gut assumptions to question the way things are, we can improve our situation – the situation of all mankind.

Dovetailing neatly with Race is the other book I’m reading: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington (Doubleday, 2006). Washington uses history to explain why, today, many African Americans justifiably mistrust the medical system.

Reading Race has improved my understanding of the racial climate in America in the era Washington discusses (I’m only halfway through her book). Though it still seems unbelievable that humans could visit unspeakable horrors on other humans in the name of science, I now better understand that the white doctors doing these abhorrent things truly saw their black patients/subjects as less than human. This will never excuse what has happened, but viewing the events through a more contemporary lens helps explain how it did happen.

You can read the introduction to Race here. Marc Aronson also blogs for School Library Journal. His blog is Nonfiction Matters.

*The other day a middle school boy and his mom were in the library, and I overheard the boy say, “I hate reading books we’re forced to read.” Which, let’s face it, is the foundation of most schoolwork. Mom’s response is what really made me cringe, though. “Oh, you just hate reading, period.” Chicken and egg, anyone? And yes, I’m a Stephen Krashen fan. Free voluntary reading, baby!