Books (not Boobs)

Currently reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the Midwest, Northeast and West between ~1915-1970. It tells the stories of three actual people she interviewed who made the trek at different points in time. It took me a while to get into it because I haven't had much time to read but I'm really enjoying it. Although reading about the lynchings etc is always gut-wrenching.

I previously read Caste by the same author which gave me a better understanding of how systemic racism in the US developed.

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Currently reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the Midwest, Northeast and West between ~1915-1970. It tells the stories of three actual people she interviewed who made the trek at different points in time. It took me a while to get into it because I haven't had much time to read but I'm really enjoying it. Although reading about the lynchings etc is always gut-wrenching.

I previously read Caste by the same author which gave me a better understanding of how systemic racism in the US developed.

It's wild how conversations about systemic racism with people who think it's a crock go when you start to explain the history and how legislation was and is still used to maintain the system of oppression against people of colour. The reasoning invariably comes back to some version of "well they have the same rights as everyone else (white people) so it's their own fault for not working hard enough, etc". Similar thinking exists around the topic of privilege and you get things like "well white people are poor too". They look at programs aimed at equality and equity as taking things away from them instead of trying to make things more equal. Sometimes there's that moment when you can see the light bulb go off, but their ego won't let them acknowledge it because their identity rests partially on the belief that it's not their fault or they are good people who treat everyone equally. You see a lot of the same attitudes and similar types of arguments when it comes to hate against the trans community, there's always some sort of deflection or rationale that simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Often the retorts fall into the fallacy of association.

What really seems to disarm people is when you take the target of their hate out of the discussion and talk generically about rights and social justice that would also benefit them and then ask if you want those things for one community then why don't you want them for all communities? Hate is of course a learned behaviour, but I'm also starting to think it's a coping mechanism for people who don't want to examine what's not working in their own lives - it's hetero cis white supremacy in its most basic form.

TLDR - it always comes back to power and money

Reading my third Marukami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. This is definitely the weirdest one yet, very surreal. I made it about 2/3rds so far, not the easiest to read but I'm still sort of fascinated.

Kind of on topic to the "who eats out" thread, Michael Ruhlman wrote a few books about cooking and becoming a chef that are great reads.

The Soul of a Chef, The Making of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef are all fantastic and each give a different perspective in the professional chef world. The first 2 are more on the practical experience and the third is the impact of a chef in the modern (at the time of writing) world of media.