Time for my biweekly newsletter!
This week I wrote up my thoughts on three books that reinforced each other in an alternate perspective to the more conventional capitalist, “free market” orthodoxy where “great men” (and it’s always men) do great things.
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, by Michael Harriot, flips the spotlight, centering the Black and Indigenous experience, and treating White Americans as the arrogant credit-taking bystanders that they often were.
Poverty, by America, by Pulitzer Prize winning author Matthew Desmond, asks the question of why the richest country on earth has so much poverty. His conclusion is that it is a collective choice to create that inequality, to focus on elevating the rich at the cost of the poor.
Be A Revolution, by Ijeoma Oluo, offers a plan to change these systems through the revolutionary act of rejecting ideologies that treat people as “less than” and taking action each day to address inequities.
These three works of history, sociology and activism tell a consistent narrative, and yet I would have unthinkingly rejected them a few years ago because they would have challenged my beliefs of “the way things are”. Even if you don’t agree with these perspectives, I invite you to take a peek inside at what I found powerful in these books.
https://lnkd.in/gN9pXhSW