Editor’s note: At this time we do not have a week three recap for you from the interfaith book group, as our usual correspondent is out of town. Instead, we have a recommendation for additional reading material.
This note is a follow up to our discussion this past Wednesday. During that discussion, I delivered a message from my wife Vassie. Her perspective was everyone in our group would agree that racism is not good. Her analogy was all of us would similarly agree that slavery is not good… none of us would ever have slaves. But in American history, while there were many people who believed slavery was not good, there were not very many people who were true abolitionist. She defined an abolitionist as someone who not only did not own slaves, but someone who was also willing to take actions to abolish slavery from the American system. So Vassie’s suggestion was that our discussion might be better served if we moved away from trying to decide whether we individually were racist and eventually moved toward a discussion of how might we abolish racism. None of us wants systematic racism. But are we willing to work to change that system… to be an Antiracist?
Vassie said there is a good book about all of this, titled How to be an Antiracist. I’ve not read it. So I can’t recommend it. But I’ve purchased it on Audible and I am currently listening to it (It’s about 10 hours long). Under Audible, you are allowed to give any friend a free book if they’ve never accepted a free Audible book from some other friend. So each of you can download the book for free if you’ve not accepted a free book under Audible in the past.
If you prefer to read a physical book, or like to do your reading on Kindle, you can purchase a copy through Amazon Smile.
— Bill Taylor