On the way to the park with our dog yesterday, we ran into a friend, a fellow middle-aged white mom. After we’d managed to recognize each other under our masks, I asked how she was doing.
“Living safe in my nice house on my nice street, wrapped in my white privilege!” she replied.
She sounded so depressed and guilty, and while I know what she means and perhaps how she feels, reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s book, as I’m doing right now, shows me how incredibly ancient and evil white supremacy is and helps me try and situate myself as I continue to figure out what my responsibility and agency is in the current moment and going forward.
Annette Gordon-Reed, you get one pingy-dingy! Thank you for your incredible scholarship and your brilliance in depicting the world of Sally Hemings and her family. Thank you for extending compassion and love to those people whose full lives were left out of the written record for despicible and obscene reasons, but who are an integral and deeply important part of American history.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online.
At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life prevents posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”) As I recover from treatment for breast cancer, however, I’m just going to post whenever I can manage.
The Total Femme 