An impressive group of writers; kudos to the organizer.
Once again I won't be able to order a copy in time but there's a fair chance the one good English language bookstore in town has it. If so, I'm in.
My copy should be delivered within the next few days, so I'll have to fall behind on the reading the old-fashioned way.
Woo! Looking forward.
Semi-related: Is everyone listening to the This American Life two-part story on school segregation? I don't think I had ever actually heard the show before, but I listened to the entire first episode.
In general, the story is really good. It's unfortunate that they chose to go with the title The Problem We All Live With, though.
(It's a nod to a famous Rockwell painting, which itself has the same unfortunate title. The focus of the painting is young Ruby Bridges, a black girl being walked to school by two white men, except you don't see the men's heads. So it looks as though little Ruby is "the problem," even though the title is meant figuratively.)
Also semi-related, and because Witt will probably be very interested, I recommend the article Harold Pollack links today, here:
http://apps.tcf.org/architecture-of-segregation
The fact that the last 15 years have seen an unprecedented re-concentration of poverty, reversing prior trends was an eye opener for me. And the patterns are no longer confined to inner cities.
As someone who bought his house in the city in 1990, raised his kids and sent them to public schools, and has watched his neighborhood become more diverse, I assumed that what I experienced was more typical of the country than it was. In fact since 2000 the pace of suburbanization may have increased. And it is at the expense of older close-in suburbs as much as of inner cities, a process the author calls suburban "cannibalization."
He links the predicament and environment of cities like Ferguson to this trend, in a way I find all too plausible.
6 makes me want to note that much of the now-denigrated East and South Oakland was originally suburbs.
The book has arrived! It's a lot shorter than I expected, so I may actually finish it. I'll have to fail to add value to the reading group the old-fashioned way.
5: I have. Francis Howell townhall meeting: still infuriating.
3 Good point, I should try to download it to my kindle.
So it looks as though little Ruby is "the problem," even though the title is meant figuratively.
I just saw this, and Witt, I think you're not giving Rockwell enough credit for deliberate irony. That is, "The Problem We All Live With" would have come across to his white audience as a perfectly reasonable way of talking about school desegregation: "the problem" is black children, and specifically how to educate them in a way that comports with the law, but negotiating actually putting them in the same classroom with white kids.
But when you turn from the abstraction of the title, which does set up black children as the problem, to the actual picture, in which a beautiful, well-cared for and well-behaved, perfect little girl is the only person in the picture (as you say, her white bodyguards (National Guardsmen, maybe?) have their heads out of frame. And she's obviously not 'the problem', she's obviously not a problem for anyone, she's an innocent, harmless, little girl -- the picture itself makes the abstract framing that blames black children for being 'the problem' an absurdity.
Maybe I'm overreading, but I think that had to have been intentional. Rockwell was hokey, but very political about this stuff.
And I did listen to the TAL episodes (had to wrestle with iTunes a bit, which didn't want to let me). Very well done, and very enraging. I thought the second episode was going to be easier to listen to, but I finished it just as angry as the first episode.
Interesting, but perhaps excessively sincere response to David Brooks' on Ta-Nehisi Coates' book.