A White Woman and Her Book Club

From the moment I was awakened to feminism in a Psychology of Women class in college back in the 1980s, I have been an avid student of it. My reading and viewing choices, even now, would exhaust many in their feminist-bent predictability.

Through that conscious effort, I learned things about women’s history that I never read in a junior high or high school textbook. In retrospect, I realized I’d gotten a solid foundation in white men’s history back then. If I wanted to go beyond that, it was going to be up to me.

So it has been roughly 40 years that I’ve been schooling myself in (mostly white) feminism.

What I realized, finally, this year while we were locked in our homes watching George Floyd’s death and its fallout, is that if I was ever going to truly, deeply understand the racial divide in the United States, it was going to take similar due diligence. Books, documentaries, conversations.

So I posted on Facebook that I’d be reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and asked if anyone would like to join me for a Zoom discussion about it. There was wide response, and from that and word-of-mouth I formed a mailing list for the group.

Buoyed by two enthused, meaningful meetings about Alexander’s book, I decided (with a co-facilitating colleague) to start calling it a book club.