Welcome to Litsy!

I love the way that Storygraph makes looking at my reading stats easy.

One of the most meaningful, empowering, and visionary books I‘ve read in some time. It was in part a call to action re: 2016, so it‘s….super relevant. Valarie Kaur is an important voice for right now, and always. Looking forward to reading her recently published book soon (tagged in comment ⬇️).

From my closest book swap a while back.

I don‘t usually post political news, but this is book-related & exciting. McBride may be our first transgender person in Congress! If you haven‘t read her memoir, you should. When I finished her book, I knew I needed to keep up with her career because she is capable of moving up the political ladder.

Guilt, she says, is both helpful and healthy: “It‘s holding something we‘ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort,” she writes. Shame, on the other hand, is “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we‘ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.

It doesn‘t heal all wounds
It doesn‘t erase the pain
What time does is
add
new pages
to your story
so when you scan the past
there‘s something else to read.

“It was just Charles being Charles.”

And to his eyes, the girls didn‘t seem that upset. They kept their anguish hidden, their faces smiling, and since he‘d never spent much time thinking about the ways their experience of the world differed from his own, he assumed they saw the humor in it, the way his guy friends did. Before he left, they promised they wouldn‘t tell anyone what they had seen, because the account was supposed to be a secret.

I appreciated the section in part 1 titles, “SOME THINGS THAT HAPPEN WHEN YOU‘RE BLACK IN A MOSTLY WHITE SCHOOL.“ I feel like this was a great way to open the book because it illustrates the difficulties that Black girls in predominantly white communities face. This shows the inner turmoil that Andrea and Lolia had to face before they ever had Charles posting racist memes about them.

One thing that I appreciated about the book was how it examined the role that everyone had on the situation. The book did not solely focus on Charles, the poster of the hateful media, but also the girls who were targeted, the FOLLOWERS of the account, and outsiders. I emphasized followers because I think it is very easy to fall into a space of complicity when viewing hate on the internet. The anonymity of the internet is a danger to accountability

I thought that this book would be a great read for students. I spoke about the permanence of the internet a lot with my students and while they seemed to know, they did not seem to fully understand. The author does a great job at illustrating the whole impact of Charles' account. I found it shocking that the account only had 13 followers, but I think that could really enlighten students on how things can spread well beyond the intended audience.