Start a diversity bookclub
In any community, there are diversity issues – the natives vs the newcomers, race issues that pit black against white, gay and straight clashes, classism – and often, we’re not equipped to talk about them. Dialogue that approaches the issues head-on sometimes is too difficult, we avoid it, or we talk "at" rather than "with" those we perceive to be different from ourselves. We demonize the other and try to prove them wrong rather than understand their point of view. We don’t bridge, but create both metaphoric and literal gated communities instead.
Can literature help?
That’s the question I’m asking myself this spring. Because I have a commitment to read more this year, and because I want to create fiction and art myself out of my passion around diversity issues, I’m wondering if reading books can provide a community a way in to tough issues. I’m about to find out.
The "Bridging Differences Bookclub" will launch in April – for those 37days readers in Asheville or surrounding areas, please join us. We’ll meet the first Monday of each month (beginning in April 2007) at 7pm at Malaprop’s bookshop downtown.
Friends have sent an amazing list of suggestions for reading – from Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing to Dave Eggers’ What is the What to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues to Suzanne Clores’ Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider to Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity to Reza Aslan’s No God but God to David Berreby’s Us and Them – and far beyond.
Do you have a book or two you’d recommend? I’m looking for suggestions of books (fiction, nonfiction, and memoir) that provide the reader with a new perspective, that allow us to hear new voices and explore culture, race, gender – a whole range of diversity issues – in a new way. What do you suggest we read?
I’ll post the reading list as we move through the year, in case you’d like to follow along…
