When you were a kid, did books make you "uncomfortable" & "ashamed" of your whiteness?

[Hekate]

82. The book-burners have no idea, do they? I felt empathy for the oppressed, identified with girls...

Last edited Fri Jan 28, 2022, 05:42 PM - Edit history (1)

… my age and older, felt protective of the weak, outraged at injustice, and got empowerment from the stories of ordinary people who rose to heroism.

I felt empowered by the example of people I read about, especially young people. I didn’t say to myself that I couldn’t relate to the biography of Harriet Tubman that I read in 5th grade, nor did I feel guilt for the sins of others. I admired her and asked myself if I could ever be that brave, and what I would do if it were I. I asked what I could have done as a white person living in that time, and pondered the white people who participated in the Underground Railroad, putting their lives and livelihoods at risk of the law — and then over time found out about the Abolitionist movement, iwhich could not have functioned without the white women who participated, their organizing skills often honed in the humble Sunday School mission efforts.

To Kill a Mockingbird was inexpressibly sad, and so much was told from a child’s-eye view…

I cried at the end of Anne Frank when I was 14, even though I knew how it ended already. I read other books current at the time (in grade school and in high school), and learned that there were many participating in the Resistance from their own homes by sheltering Jews — putting their own lives at risk. I asked myself, what would I have done? In my child’s heart I was sure I could have done my part.

I was not a child but in my 30s when I met a Belgian Resistance fighter in real life, who by then was a very old man. One day something triggered his memories and a flood of stories came forth, some of which I knew (he was in the hospital when the Nazis came for his family, and they all perished in Auschwitz), but I heard other things, like how he blew up a train, & another time saved several downed American pilots. He told these stories vividly. But there was more: he took Jewish children to Catholic nuns, as many as he could, and the nuns took them in. My father in law revered those nuns to the end of his long life.

These are not bad emotions for a kid to have — they are human and promote empathy and understanding. Narration brings history alive.

And that’s a clue to these clueless adults, isn’t it? They are deathly afraid that if history is taught fully, that their story will change, and that they will feel all those emotions they project onto their kids, especially when those same kids ask questions they can’t or won’t answer. “What did you do in the war, daddy?” would be the least of those penetrating questions.

The adults would be forced to think, and their brains might crack from the strain.

Book-burners. May we do our part and resist. May the gods keep us from a new Dark Age.