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'Sundown Towns' discussion TODAY

The online book club is happening now at this thread.

Did you know that thousands of U.S. communities still live with the legacy of being "sundown towns" - places where blacks or other people of color could not linger after sunset? Join us at 1 p.m. Eastern this Wednesday, July 23, as James W. Loewen - author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism -  discusses his groundbreaking book and the way many communities still struggle today with their decades of "whites only" history. Most important, learn what we can do to help publicize, challenge, and overcome the lingering effects of this largely hidden part of our nation's history.

Today's water cooler will start at 1 p.m. Eastern. Look for a new post then that says "Welcome to the water cooler."

Friday digest-open thread 7/11/08

This lovely little video of a young man dancing with people all over the world has been making its way across the Internet in recent weeks. Global civic engagement, dancing diplomacy, sheer fun, or all of the above? You decide!

Staying in an, um, lighter vein this mid-summer weekend, have you checked out Stuff White People Like? This immensely popular website - now out in book form, for which blog creator Christian Lander received a $300,000 advance - pokes gentle fun at the lifestyles of upscale Euro-Americans and their affinity for coffee (#1), sushi (#41), and sweaters (#101), among many other passions.

But writing in the current issue of The American Prospect (excerpt here; the entire article available by subscription only), Samhita Mukhopadhyay wonders whether the blog isn't merely "a place for white people to chortle at the oddities of race and class and then congratulate themselves for having done so, thus neatly avoiding the need to delve any deeper. ...  It's worth wondering if such a blog could have thrived were its author a person of color .... There are many people of color who write regularly (and yes, sometimes even with a sense of humor) about racism and whiteness, but they're not getting six-figure book deals." Look at the site and see what you think. While you're at it, why not visit Stuff Educated Black People Like, Stuff Latinos Like, Things Asian People Like, Stuff Indians Like ... let's hope some of these people can cash in, too.

I'm going on vacation for a week! Keep it dialed in here to DemSpace for guest posts galore. I'll be back on the blog July 21 - and don't forget our Everyday Democracy Book Club with James Loewen at 1 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, July 23.

Summer books roundup

It's time for our regular roundup of recent books of interest to people who are working, organizing, and educating for positive community change. Our selections this season include: A Greater Democracy Day by Day, edited by Sally Mahé and Kathy Covert; Inheriting the Trade by Thomas Norman DeWolf; and The She Spot: Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World - And How to Reach Them by Lisa Witter and Lisa Chen. You can get these books at your local bookseller, or online, or at the links offered below.

Everyday Democracy's executive director Martha McCoy gave a copy of A Greater Democracy Day by Day to each of our staff members and associates to commemorate the occasion of our organization's recent name change, from the Study Circles Resource Center to Everyday Democracy. The 2004 book is a collection of 365 quotations, each intended to help grow and renew our visions of democracy. (Here's today's: "Emergence, to a great degree, is simply what we didn't plan. How to arrive at the best possible unplanned outcome is what emergent democracy is all about." - Mitch Ratcliffe, author.) Each month opens with a small essay on such topics as Roots and Wings (January), Creativity (July), and Cooperation (November). There's also an annotated index with a brief biographical note about each quotation's author. This is an inspirational book for everyone working to strengthen our democracy, as well as anyone who writes, thinks, or speaks about the work in progress that we call the United States of America. (Order here.)

Last week marked the PBS broadcast premier of Traces of the Trade, a film about one family's exploration of its slave-trading past. One of the 10 family members who made the trip from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back wrote the book Inheriting the Trade about that experience. Thomas Norman DeWolf's book has been out since January but is now gaining attention as a companion piece to the film. On the book's website, DeWolf notes how the book and film are invitations to a deeper conversation about who we are and how we relate to one another, adding,  "We live in fearful times in a troubled world. I believe we are called to wake up, to open our eyes wide and recognize our kinship with each other, with all others, as equals. We can meet the challenges we face in our world by truly developing compassion for each other, by our intentions, and our actions, to understand those who differ from us." (Order here.)

I read about The She Spot in the June issue of Free-Range thinking, the monthly newsletter from communications consulting firm a goodman. The book's authors, Lisa Chen and Lisa Witter, work for Fenton Communications, the largest public interest communications firm in the United States. Asked by Andy Goodman to define the "She Spot," Witter said, "It's the spot that motivates women to get involved in social change." "And if I had to physically locate it?" Goodman asked. "I'd point to the head and the heart," Witter replied. Chen added that women are tougher customers than men (making 83 percent of consumer decisions) and "that's why if you meet women's bottom line, you'll pick up men, too." The authors add that community-building is another important way to reach women. (Order here.)

Reminder: The Everyday Democracy Book Club will meet here on Wednesday, July 23, for a discussion of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism with author James W. Loewen.  Please plan to join us!

Summer book club selection

We're pleased to announce the summer selection for our Everyday Democracy Book Club - Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. The author of the book, James W. Loewen, will join us to discuss the book at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, July 23, right here at DemocracySpace.org.

Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Sundown Towns in its starred review:

According to bestselling sociologist Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me), "something significant has been left out of the broad history of race in America as it is usually taught," namely the establishment between 1890 and 1968 of thousands of "sundown towns" that systematically excluded African-Americans from living within their borders. Located mostly outside the traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots, policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian communities—and some of them continue such unsavory practices to this day.

Loewen's eye-opening history traces the sundown town's development and delineates the extent to which state governments and the federal government, "openly favor[ed] white supremacy" from the 1930s through the 1960s, "helped to create and maintain all-white communities" through their lending and insuring policies. "While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North... they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county," Loewen points out. The expulsion forced African-Americans into urban ghettoes and continues to have ramifications on the lives of whites, blacks and the social system at large.

You can order Sundown Towns from your local bookseller, find it in many libraries, or buy it online here, here, or here.  Read the book, then be here at Democracy Space.org at 1 p.m. Eastern on July 23 as we join author James  W. Loewen for a lively discussion of Sundown Towns.

Colorado Springs book talk

We've just seen a notice that Matt Leighninger will be visiting the Penrose Branch Library, 20  N. Cascade Ave., in Colorado Springs to talk about his book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same. The event is set from 4 to 5:30 Wednesday, June 11,in the library's Carnegie Room. Get more information here. Matt was a recent guest at the Everyday Democracy Book Club here at DemocracySpace. Read the transcript here.

May books roundup

It's time for our monthly roundup of recent books of interest to people who are working, organizing, and educating for positive community change. This month's selections include The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop; Moyers on Democracy by Bill Moyers; The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News by Roger Mudd; and The Message: 100 Life Lessons from Hip-Hop's Greatest Songs by Felicia Pride. You can get these books at your local bookseller, or online, or at the links offered below.

We learned about The Big Sort via a mention on Rich Harwood's blog, Redeeming Hope, in which Rich cited it in a post about nonprofit funders' discomfort when issues of race and class arise. A comment on the book at its amazon.com page reads, "This book is intriguing, convincing, also sad and scary for anybody who hopes to be living in a democracy ... We're living (in) a new segregationist era, and it goes a whole lot deeper than skin." Bishop's book explores how and why, although America as a whole is more diverse than ever, we've divided ourselves into neighborhoods where people live, think, and vote mostly alike; we watch TV news shows and read blogs that mirror, rather than challenge, our political viewpoints; and we attend church with people who believe just as we do. Alas, all this sorting makes us "ideologically inbred," unable or unwilling to communicate with people who don't share our lifestyles and views. This book certainly has important implications for organizers who are trying to bring together diverse groups of people for dialogues and problem-solving. (Order here.)

Moyers on Democracy is a collection of speeches - each preceded by a new essay - by the great public television journalist Bill Moyers, who earlier in his career served as a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, as press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, and as publisher of Newsday. From his decades of viewing American life and democracy, Moyers now writes about how our nation seems to be betraying its democratic ideals and its reformist history. His topics include the place of religion in public life; the mounting environmental crisis; the struggle to keep public television and radio free of political manipulation and ideological censorship; and Washington's culture of corruption - but characteristically, Moyers keeps a cool head even at his angriest. Studs Terkel says of the book: "Bill Moyers has been my North Star, in his eloquence, his quiet passion and courage, and in the way he presents me and millions of others with the ideals of our nation, from our past to our present to our uncertain future. Always he offers the gifts of thoughtfulness and of hope." (Order here.)

Another noted television journalist of the last half-century, Roger Mudd, is out with his memoir of a life at CBS, NBC, and The History Channel. Writing about the book in The Washington Post, James Rosen said, "Americans under the age of 30 may have no memory of a time when 'anchorman' connoted not some buffoonish Will Ferrell creation but the nation's most trusted figure. 'If I've lost Cronkite,' Lyndon Johnson fretted during Vietnam, 'I've lost middle America.' And in those days, CBS News dominated the capital the way the Yankees once owned autumn. Mudd's The Place To Be brilliantly captures an era when war, protests, riots, assassinations and scandals rocked America and a newly ascendant medium transmitted images of the upheaval in real time." This book may be a good complement to The Big Sort, above, as it also describes a time when most Americans got their national and world news from one of the big networks, not from the bewildering array of niche media we have now. (Order here.)

Ah, but time marches on and these days, niche media is the main way that many people get their news. Felicia Pride explains how music can carry more than a tune in The Message: 100 Life Lessons from Hip-Hop's Greatest Songs. Founder of the pro-book, pro-community website The Backlist and a self-described "literacy advocate, hip-hop baby, and book chick," Pride plumbs the depths of the best, most positive hip-hop music to show how it has affected the way she and millions of others live, work, think, and love. "This book is about searching for the power within and using motivational aspects of hip-hop music to help us successfully maneuver our worlds," Pride writes in the book's intro. (Order here.) 

Do you have another book to recommend, or thoughts about any of these? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Welcome to the book club (5/08)

Update ... click here for the easier-to-read, threaded version of this discussion.

Welcome to this month's water cooler, which is also the spring meeting of the Everyday Democracy Book Club. For the next hour, from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern, we'll be discussing The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same with its author, Matt Leighninger.

Matt is the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium as well as a senior associate with Everyday Democracy. His book, published by the Vanderbilt University Press, draws from his years of working with communities to better engage citizens in decision making, problem solving, and the daily work of democracy. As the jacket copy says:

Beneath the national radar, the relationship between citizens and government is undergoing a dramatic shift. More than ever before, citizens are educated, skeptical, and capable of bringing the decision-making process to a sudden halt. Public officials and other leaders are tired of confrontation and desperate for resources. In order to address persistent challenges like education, race relations, crime prevention, land use planning, and economic development, communities have been forced to find new ways for people and public servants to work together.

During the next hour, we'l learn from Matt and each other how innovative public officials and committed activists are forging new ways to run our neighborhoods, cities, counties, and beyond. Here's how the water cooler will work:

I'll ask Matt the first question at 1 p.m. Eastern. To follow the Q&A discussion, click on the word "comments" below this post. If you'd like to pose a question or add a comment, look for the phrase "POST A COMMENT" at the end of the existing comments. Below it, insert your name (real names, please); email address (it will not be visible online); and, if you like, the URL of your organization or program’s website. Write your question or comment in the box, then click “post.”

Please note: You will need to refresh your browser periodically to see the latest questions and comments that have been posted and answered. If traffic gets heavy, you may be asked to verify your comment with a "captcha check," or typing in a string of letters.

Also, if you see that several questions have already been asked, please be kind and give Matt a chance to catch up before posting your question.
We'll post a rethreaded, easier-to-read version of this live blog at our wiki within 24 hours. (You can read past water cooler discussions there, too.)

Thank you for joining us for today's meeting of the Everyday Democracy Book Club! And now, let the discussion begin ...

April books roundup

It's time for our monthly roundup of recent books of interest to people who are working, organizing, and educating for positive community change. This month's selections include Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon; Fight  Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community by Bill McKibben and the Step It Up Team; and The True Patriot: A Pamphlet by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer. You can get these books at your local bookseller, or online, or at the links offered below.

Slavery by Another Name tells how for decades after the Civil War, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, charged with outrageous fines, then sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. The practice was finally given up due to government embarrassment over possible enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II. Blackmon, a white man who is Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, started writing nearly a decade ago about how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century. This book grew out of that reporting. (Order here.) Click here for more of Blackmon's writings on race, school resegregation (he attended Mississippi schools as they were integrated in the 1970s), baseball, and more.  You can also read an excerpt from the book and listen to a "Talk of the Nation" interview with Blackmon here.

Earth Day 2008 may be behind us, but many communities are eager to keep the momentum going. In Fight Global Warming Now, McKibben and his collaborators offer a hands-on, locally oriented guidebook for halting climate change. McKibben draws from the lessons of 1,400 Step It Up demonstrations held last spring, one of the biggest days of environmental action since the original Earth Day and one that came together in mere months. He pledges that proceeds from the book will go back into efforts to combat climate change. (Order here.) Another recent McKibben book - Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future - is recently out in paperback, and it's a good companion to Fight Global Warming Now. McKibben shares why, particularly in our current era of unequal wages and dwindling natural resources, "more" usually doesn't mean "better." He shows how communities around the world are building vibrant local economies where people work together to create more of their own food, energy, and even entertainment.

The True Patriot has been out for a few months, but it may be a good prism through which to view the rest of this presidential election year. "We believe all politics is fundamentally about morality," Liu and Hanauer write in the slim book's introduction. "What rules do we need to live a good life together? How should those rules govern the choices we make not only as individuals but as a community?" Written in the style of Thomas Paine's classic Common Sense, The True Patriot has a decidedly progressive philosophy but one that calls to conservatives as well by appealing to core American values, like sharing of sacrifice. In a radio interview, Liu said, "I think if you take these values seriously, you’re able to find a zone where people of both parties can come together and say, 'You know what? This is the essence of true patriotism: whether we are looking out for the next generation, whether we have a sense of obligation and responsibility, not just to ourselves but to those who are going to come after us.'" (Order here.)

What are you reading these days? What's next on your list?

Friday digest-open thread 4/18/08

It's time to announce the spring selection for our Everyday Democracy Book Club. Join us here at Democracy Space at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, May 15, as we'll meet with Everyday Democracy senior associate Matt Leighninger to discuss his book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same. In the book, Matt - who also is executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium - tells how communities all across the nation are seeing how officials and citizens can work together to address pressing issues.

This will be a great opportunity to share stories of "shared governance" and learn from other communities (and Matt's considerable expertise). Order the book from your local bookstore or online, and be sure to mark your calendar for May 15. And if you missed our last book club with Frances Moore Lappé, you can read the transcript here.

Speaking of the DDC, thanks to Joe Goldman for his tip on this recent article on Politico.com, in which e-democracy advocate Steven Clift asked this timely question: “Isn’t it interesting that the best-designed government websites are those collecting your taxes, while the worst sites are those giving you a say on how your taxes are spent?” The article tells how many other governments are way beyond ours in offering the public a chance to comment on legislation, submit petitions, and more. For example, write authors Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifr, "In England, anyone can submit an e-petition directly on the 10 Downing Street website, and the most popular ones are featured on the site’s home page. More than 7 million people — one in 10 British citizens — have signed one of those petitions since the site’s launch in the fall of 2006."

Next week, Everyday Democracy will be holding the first of two Learning Exchanges for the nine communities involved in our Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative. Two important articles on this topic crossed our desks this week. Education Week had the bad but not unsurprising news that the academic achievement gap grows fastest for bright African-American children, particularly in schools with higher black populations, "where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find."

Meanwhile, criminal injustice is in the spotlight in the current issue of the alumni magazine for Brown University, where economics professor Glenn Loury has been working to bring greater attention to the fact, as author Beth Schwartzapfel wrote, "that the number of black men incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the general population—reflects the social dishonor to which African Americans are still subject today, a dishonor with roots in U.S. slavery." Click here to read "A Nation of Jailers."

The good news is that many communities are proactively deciding to address racial inequity, often with the help of resources from Everyday Democracy. If you caught yesterday's water cooler, you learned how Lynchburg, Virginia, successfully held the action forum for its first round of "Many Voices - One Community" dialogues on race and racism this week, and how activists from New Haven and Stratford, Connecticut; Jacksonville, Florida; Syracuse, New York; and Memphis, Tennessee are being - and leading - the change they want to see in their communities.

Next week at DemocracySpace: We'll have news from communities walking the walk for Earth Day and two days of live blogging from the CCRE Learning Exchange. If you like what you read here, you can get it delivered right to your email box by subscribing via the link atop the right-hand side of the page.

Happy Passover to our Jewish readers!

From the pop culture files

Welcome to the latest in a series of occasional posts on popular books, music, films, and more that might be of interest to people working on community change.

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz claimed the prize "for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life." Díaz's debut novel was hailed on its release last fall for its genre-bending mixture of literary styles, described by A.O. Wilson in his review in The New York Times as "a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus."

I haven't yet read Oscar Wao, but we offer props to the Pulitzer judges for recognizing a book that celebrates the United States as it is today: a gloriously alive, magnificently messy salad bowl of careening cultures that still usually manage to move toward unity. Here's an interview with Díaz in which he describes his literary influences and the decade-long process (following a widely praised first book, Drown) of finding the novel he wanted to write.

If you're looking for a slightly silly, slightly sweet movie tribute to community life and interracial friendships, check out the recent film Be Kind Rewind, probably currently playing at a bargain movie house near you. The basic plot is that Mike (played by Mos Def) is minding his boss' video store in Passaic, New Jersey, when his best friend Jerry (Jack Black) gets into a freak accident that magnetizes his body. After Jerry manages to erase all the VHS tapes in the store (there are no DVDs), Mike and Jerry decide to make amends by filming their own versions of films including Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, and Driving Miss Daisy. Soon, people are lining up outside the door to request remakes of their favorite films.

The subplots are even more intriguing. Neighborhood kids love to hang out at Be Kind Rewind, not so much for its movie selection as for the repartee with Mike, Jerry, and store owner Elroy (Danny Glover). Mike and Jerry acquire a sidekick, Alma (Melonie Díaz), from the dry cleaners down the street, and she helps not only add female casting to the remakes, she challenges the young men to consider the depth of their relationship. The owner of a nearby modern video emporium comes to the rescue at a critical juncture. There's even a historic preservation thread as the city of Passaic has designs on tearing down the video store - perhaps the boyhood home of jazz great Fats Waller - to build upscale condos. Be Kind Rewind was written and directed by Michel Gondry, who also made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He definitely has a gift for offbeat, fun, and soul-warming films.

Have you read any good books lately? Seen any good films?