Today, the daily devotional we read during home school included poem about presenting a positive demeanor to the world and not bogging people down with our personal woes and health concerns. Tell God how good you feel, and God will make it so, was essentially the closing prayer.
This afternoon, after a week-plus break from social media, I hopped back on IG. One of the first posts in my neglected feed was a slideshow about white people’s toxic tendency of pretending everything is OK all the time. According to the infographic, this prevents Black people from being open about their reality and makes it hard for them to trust white people or feel safe around them. White privilege allows us – encourages us? – to pretend things are OK even when they aren’t.
I want to introduce my kids to voices that historically haven’t been amplified.
I asked our children’s librarians for books about Indigenous people, and by Indigenous people, and they provided me with an big bag of books from board books all the way up to YA lit.
These are four of my favorites.
I have a pile of antiracism books on my bedside stand, and every month when my antiracism book club announces next month’s title, I hope that it will be one of those books. So far, it’s only happened once. Which means I keep being introduced to new books, but I haven’t made much progress on my bedside stand book pile.
As we continue to do the work on antiracism, we’re going to make mistakes even while trying to get it right.
If you don’t want to drive yourself crazy, you have to accept that there will be times when perhaps you should have spoken up and didn’t, or should have stayed quiet, but didn’t, and instead said something idiotic. Or worse, said something that might have been idiotic, but you can’t be sure.
Today is a day of mourning for Native Americans. It has been so for fifty years. As our country awakens again to the tragedies that have dogged us at every stage of our history, it’s difficult to find a holiday that can be celebrated without mixed feelings.
Truthfully, what holiday was ever free of baggage? These days were already burdened with the small and large issues we have with them, wrapped up in financial woes, boundaries with family members, or our own dark personal struggles.
If you go back to my very first blog post, I talked about the pressure of trying to make all the holiday magic by myself. In the couple of years since then, I’ve realized that I don’t have to do it alone.
