The White Pages Shaggy, Self-Promotional Summer Spectacular
A bit of this, a bit of that... plus new Barnraisers cohorts
It’s been a while since I’ve done a somewhat-logistical-but-also-a-bit-of-nonsense-post. I hope they’re fun for you. They’re definitely fun for me.
FALL BARNRAISERS COHORTS: ENROLLING NOW
If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider joining me for one of the most joyous and welcoming political education spaces I’ve ever gotten to experience. You can enroll here and learn more about them here but, what the heck, let’s speed run through a few highlights:
-The cohorts are virtual (zoom).
-They’re, free (but donations are solicited- both for us to keep our lights on and for you to support other organizing efforts you admire. I think of it as a mutual aid situation. I offer the cohorts and, if they’re useful for you and you can pitch in to help then you offer that back).
-They last for ten weeks (the class part is biweekly for 90 minutes), starting the week of September 12th.
-That means that you’ll have one 90 minute class the following weeks: Sep 12, Sep 26, Oct 10, Oct 24 and Nov 7. There will be some homework in the off weeks, but nothing too wild.
-We offer a bunch of different time slots (you’ll give preferences when you register and then we’ll assign you to a slot that works well for you).
-You don’t need organizing experience or a brilliant campaign to join. Together, we’ll learn how to bring White people into broader coalitions for the common good. And we’ll be kind and have fun with each other as we do so.
So far we’ve had 600 folks complete the cohorts from 45 states and a dozen countries. Many of those folks finished up, are now thinking differently about the world, but haven’t yet gotten involved in an active organizing project. That’s fine! Many others have either joined up with or launched something cool— reparations funds, faith-based agitation, neighborhood mutual aid efforts, political campaigns, affordable housing iniatives, “hey-what-if-our-wealthy-white-neighborhood-actually-supported-economic-and-racial-justice-for-our-whole-community?” groups who hold boisterous backyard gatherings. That’s also wonderful.
What I’m saying is I earnestly love these cohorts and it’d be great to have you be part of our community too.
BOOKS: WHAT DO I RECOMMEND THESE DAYS?
I’m reading a couple of books in tandem right now. Together they feel like a bit of a skeleton key that helps explain a lot that’s felt unsatisfactory about the more superficial ways we talk about race and class and identity. The first is After the Ivory Tower Falls by Will Bunch. It’s about college, but in particular about the mid-century sliding door moment when America almost committed to higher education as a human right for all but then… didn’t (in large part, of course, because of racist backlashes both loud and quiet). It’s also about how much White America’s current rivalry between Sum-of-Small-Things-college-grads with their email jobs vs. “proud deplorables” with either real or cosplayed working class credentials has followed from that choice. It’s good! And for those of you who, like me, went to a leafy Midwestern liberal arts college in or near a slightly-down-on-its-heals factory town, you’ll appreciate how much time the book spends at Kenyon College. Full Force Gambier, baby.
Also quite good, in a way that again feels spiritually connected, is Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture, which is about how this thing we currently think about as “identity politics” has really radical roots (I mean, of course it does! Combahee River Collective!) but it’s since been put through the predictable big money/big power spin cycle of appropriation and de-toothing and that’s how you end up with REI executives doing a land acknowledgment at the top of a union busting video. It isn’t an anti-identity-politics book, but it is a book that’s critical of the ways that Say Their Names statements and pronoun circles and representational victories can become booby prizes that are offered to keep systems running as is, rather than transforming them.
Ooh, heavy stuff! Of course! But both books are still very readable, though perhaps less readable than a literal activity book about anti-racist activism, one that is accessible and funny as hell but still useful and with some good teeth to it. That’s to say, that kind of book exists too (or at least it does now, because Kate Schatz and W. Kamau Bell just wrote it) and I think you’ll really enjoy that too.
BOOKS: HOW IS MINE COMING?
For folks who don’t know, I’m writing a book. It’s about how yes, of course White people have to figure out how not to mess things up with Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, but we also have to figure out how to be in community to each other. It’s a memoir, so it’s about the various ways I’ve mucked up at that challenge, about the loneliness that comes from a lifetime of mucking it up as well as the joy that comes in trying to discover true community for the first time.
The update is that I wrote a first draft! And then I sent it to my editor! Great! And I felt pretty good about that draft, though there was a lot that wasn't in it yet! But.. then both my editor and the publisher hit a logjam of drafts coming through at the same time and that logjam was only going to get worse as all our books went through the various publication steps. So, they did some shuffling, and my book (which is currently called Race of Strangers but will likely be called something else and damnit I don’t know what so if you have suggestions let me know) is now going to come out in the Spring of 2024.
All this is good and isn’t stressing me out, though I will say a sincere thank you to folks who’ve donated to Barnraisers and/or become White Pages subscribers this summer. Though our family is doing totally fine (I’m not the primary income-earner so ebbs and flows in my income don’t make or break us), one thing about having your book pushed back is that the installments on your advance get pushed back too (did you know that an “advance” isn’t just paid to authors in the form of a single large novelty check? I didn’t!). Any way, that’s to say, if you were wondering whether donations to Barnraisers/subscriptions to The White Pages just get thrown in my big Scrooge Mcduck-style vault/swimming pool, they don’t. So thanks! Sincerely!
WHAT’S A CHANGE I’VE MADE RECENTLY THAT IS HELPING MY RELATIONSHIP TO MY COMMUNITY?
Transit-activist folks reading this are permitted to roll their eyes here, but my family lives in one of those American cities (read: almost all of them) where everybody who can afford a car drives most of the time and our family sort of just decided “what if we… didn’t? What if we biked and took the bus instead.” And guess what, it’s better! Like, way better, for a bunch of reasons, one of which is I’m realizing how much of my community I implicitly opted out of by being able to speed to and from an interstate exit. And no, I’m not saying I’ve made deep relationships at the bus stop. I have not heard the life story of an iconoclastic, besuited Southern men who somehow found themselves at the center of every major event in the collective Boomer subconscious. But I am saying that there are a whole bunch of my neighbors who I’ve opted out of sharing space with and even a baby step in the opposite direction feels really good.
ARE THERE ANY DOWNSIDES TO THIS NEW TRANSIT APPROACH?
Yesterday, after writing up this paragraph about my New Enlightened Transit Lifestyle I was on my bike, riding faster than I should have through a parking lot and completely missed a speed bump. Pride literally comes before the fall.
It could have been worse (helmets!) but oof I’m sore and have some fairly impressive scars that, because of how I landed, are concentrated literally on one half of my body. I’m basically Two-Face (the Batman villain) but the Middle-Aged Bike Dad version. But then, I got home and my five-year-old made me this drawing. I’m the tall one with the conspicuous-but-concentrated wounds up and down half of his body. I’m not the hand turkey.
WHAT IS A WAY I HAVE FAILED TO BE AN ACTIVE MEMBER OF MY COMMUNITY?
We just had our primary elections here in Wisconsin! If you had asked me- on Election Day morning- how I was feeling about my level of civic engagement, I would have given myself very high marks. We voted at our kids’ school! We saw neighbors! We hung out with our beloved principal! We scribbled in our little bubbles, frequently choosing candidates whom we knew personally! We were especially excited to vote for a new state assembly candidate, a guy named Darrin who had impressed us as being empathetic and smart and passionate while not being an overly-ambitious political weirdo.
And so, we donated to Darrin’s campaign. We literally had a sign with his name on it on our lawn. My wife had gone to a meet and greet and had successfully both met and greeted him. We were Darrin people, through and through.
It didn’t take very long into election night before we got good news, us Darrin people. Darrin won! And there he was, on my social media timeline, giving an inspiring speech… on the street… in front of a bar… literally one block away from our house. Our candidate! And I didn’t go out to the party, because I had just gotten into bed, but that’s not the point. The point was that I didn’t even know the party was happening on our street. The point is I would have known about this party (for a candidate for whom I was ostensibly “all in”) had I, you know, actually been involved in his campaign.
I had gotten canvassing calls. I knew who I could have reached out to in order to take a few shifts on doors. And while I didn’t have all the time in the world, I definitely had a few free afternoons here and there, especially now that my kids are old enough to go with me. I didn’t know about the party, nor did I presumably know most of the fired-up volunteers hanging out on my literal street, because I opted out. I opted out while pretending to opt in.
I’m not actually beating myself up about this too much. There will always be campaigns. There will always be chances to be involved. But there’s something interesting here, something about the simulacra of political engagement that we allow to stand in for the real thing, something about how “showing up” (in this case, doing a few canvassing shifts) is its own snowball that can roll towards community and relationships and change, something about how I probably shouldn’t over-congratulate myself as a civic hero just because I take the bus now.
AND, AS A QUICK BONUS TO NON-SUBSCRIBERS, HERE’S AN UNNECESSARY RECIPE FOR A SALAD THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO MAKE AND THE STORY THAT GOES WITH IT
This is from this weeks’s subscriber’s only discussion. We’re sharing recipes (especially potluck-y recipes) and stories that go along with them. It’s fun. Here’s what I shared. You already know this salad, I’m sure. The recipe’s not the point. Sharing stories is fun, is all, and I enjoyed sharing this one so much that I thought I’d take it off the paywall.
Ok, this is a weeknight staple for us (especially in summer) AND an easy potluck hero. It is NOT revelatory. It’s a green salad with cooked pasta and chicken. I know, you’re yawning.
Remember, though, that there was once an era before $15 quick lunch fancy salad place and it was a mind-blowing idea to add cooked pasta to a salad that was not primarily a pasta salad. Or, at least it was for me when I was 25 and I had just left the classroom to follow my then-girlfriend to Sweden and I would sit in the student union at Stockholm University trying to figure out both how to fulfill my responsibilities to the U.S.-Swedish Fulbright Commission and (more importantly) what I was going to do with my life. It was in that charmless and very, very white social democratic building that I became addicted to pre-made salads from the Pressbyrån or 7-Eleven. I ate way too many of them, always with what was then marketed in Sweden as a “Coke Lite” I never truly finished my research project. I sort of figured out my life. My buddy Keith, who ate a lot of those salads with me, would finish the dissertation he was working on and publish it into a very good book on Swedish Design. I lived vicariously through his professional follow-through.
….
And the salad?
I mean, you know what to do here, but we’ve made it this far so let’s do this.
-Any greens will do. I mean, maybe not anything too peppery or avant-garde. Remember, we’re replicating a salad that I bought in a literal convenience store. Stay populist, damnit.
-Cucumber (my family’s Venn diagram vegetable, meaning the one that is on both my children’s “I actually like that vegetable” list)/snap peas/avocados/carrots/tomatoes/fresh corn cut off cob when in season (so, um, now)/maybe some grapes?
-Overnight marinate some chicken thighs (yogurt, olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika, cumin (lots), oregano, lemon (which I forgot last night, damnit). Cast iron them! Easy!
-Choose a fun pasta shape, like, choose a dense tube or something wiggly or corkscrewy.
-Whatever dressing you like is fine. We don’t make enough of our own dressings in our household- we mostly do a simple maple mustard thing. Please, friends, turn me onto good dressings, particularly ones I likely already have the ingredients for.
-But also: Store-bought ranch rules. Use some of that. Again, populism!
-Don’t stress out about your Fulbright project. They don’t actually hold you accountable for finishing it and, sure, there’s something to excavate there (re: the amount of scrutiny say, a welfare recipient receives vs. a likely-more-privileged person who has received a Big Fancy Grant), but that is one more thing you won’t solve in a single year.
-Marry the woman you came to Sweden for. You won’t regret it, even if you’re temporarily sad that doing so means that you won’t move back to the Rez and back to teaching your specific fifth grade classroom when you return to the States. It’ll be more than worth it. There will be more communities to love, more communities where you an always be a little more involved.
Ok, that’s all!
This week’s song is “Mission Viejo” by Lifter Puller. It’s about the late summer and how sometimes you fall into a set of patterns and you tell yourself that you’re gonna change those patterns once fall comes around and I think the narrator’s supposed to be unreliable but, who knows, I’m rooting for them. And me. And us.
Ok, those pictures by your kid are priceless. I miss the days when their words just got split up however was necessary by the end of the page. Maybe it wasn’t totally worth the pain of the fall, but it’s a keeper (And sorry you got hurt!). I really appreciated you sharing with us your efforts to walk the walk. Oh and Sheri is here visiting us with two of her kids (and our kids are all getting along which is way cool!)! And we were talking about how much we appreciate you and Barnraisers! Life is cool.