Few books have altered my understanding of history and of the present moment as profoundly as The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. I want every person in the country to read this book.
The Warmth of Other
Suns is the story of the Great
Migration, the exodus of six million African Americans from the South from
around WWI through the 1970s. I
remember learning about this in high school history, but mainly as a simple
chain of cause and effect. Jim Crow
was bad, black people moved away, demographics in northern cities changed. I completely missed the big
picture. This was the largest
and fastest migration of people in American history. I’m not sure
my italics can convey how huge that statement is. How about This was the largest and fastest migration of people in American history. The sheer number of migrants dispersing at such a rapid rate
from one region to the rest of the country fundamentally changed most, if not
all, aspects of our nation—our economies, our politics, our culture.
Isabel Wilkerson weaves
the stories of three distinct migrants together with the overall picture of the
Great Migration. The personal
accounts of Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and George Swanson
Starling give the story of the Great Migration something I missed in history
class—the power and emotion of our common humanity. We learn not only of the indignities they escaped and the
challenges of their new homes, but also what they felt at those moments. We can feel Ida Mae’s nerves as she and her husband quietly
prepare to leave Mississippi, without alerting their sharecropper for fear of
retaliation. We can feel Robert’s
humiliation and delirium as he pleads for a place to sleep for the night on his
drive from Texas to California. We
can see ourselves in these people.
They make us ask, “What would I have done in their shoes? What if I had to flee the place I’d
always known and start from scratch in a foreign city?”
This is not a political
book, but it has clarified my views of civic responsibility. As President Obama said in his farewell
address,
[if our democracy is to work] For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ‘60s…
Ms. Wilkerson expertly
draws the lineage from slavery to the Jim
Crow South to the Great Migration to the present, illustrating the compounding,
deleterious effects of slavery on today’s African Americans. We can’t pretend the wealth gap between
white and black people is the result of one group’s hard work and the other’s
laziness. Black people began in this country as slaves, were kept subject
through sharecropping, denied rights and respect, forced to leave their
communities to start again elsewhere, where they faced the same prejudices and
earned less than their white counterparts. While at the same time, white people were free to build
their wealth over generations, free to attend the better half of “separate but
equal” schools, free to buy homes where realtors forgot to tour their black
clients, where those homes would appreciate in value and prove a good return on
investment. We cannot pretend institutionalized
racism is a made-up phenomenon, when almost 9% of black men in their late 20s are in prison. When, at the same
time, a young white man convicted of raping an unconscious woman walks free
after only three months in jail. It’s dishonest to pretend we all start on the
same playing field. We just don’t.
I’m not shaming white
people for our ancestors’ wrongs.
I’m asking us to recognize how our whiteness has eased our paths through
life. If we truly believe all men
and women are created equal, we have to acknowledge the injustice of the fact
that one’s mere skin color either enhances or threatens one’s ability to pursue
happiness. The Warmth of Other
Suns opened my eyes to so many
ways that is true.
I would like to end this
treatise and step off my soapbox, after a quote Ms. Wilkerson included in her Notes on Methodology, from
the 1922 Chicago Commission on Race Relations report The Negro in Chicago.
It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded, and maintained in the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and that they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance; and every citizen, regardless of color or racial origin, is in honor and conscience bound to seek and forward its solution.
Raise a glass to freedommmm
