Tag: women’s rights

The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad – Book

From a Google Image Search – Paper Literary

Imagine if Martin Luther King never existed, or if the Civil Rights movement came too late to prevent a second Civil War. It’s not hard to imagine if you just find old videos of Strom Thurmond on You Tube. In Rae Giana Rashad’s book The Blueprint, we meet Solenne and Bastien, who sound like characters in a romance book. But this is no ordinary romance. Bastien is a Councilman headed to become President of the new America known as The Order. Solenne is a young Black woman, fifteen years old, headed to become a ‘concubine’. Since this book is written by a Black woman, I will use her words to offer insight into her story. In the Author’s Note, Rashad refers to female slaves in real America as “forgotten handmaids,” so here is another handmaid’s tale, every bit as chilling as the original, except it explains how Atwood’s tale of the handmaids is even more fraught for Black women.

Page 13

“Then he was gone, ballroom lights tunneling the dark, the hush of champagne on my tongue. THE PATH WE WALKED TO BECOME Black women wasn’t straight; it was a loop. Starting from nowhere, it brought you back to nowhere. A man at one end, a man at the other, humming the same song. ‘It’s just a body. Nothing special.’ If that were true, why did they want it? Why couldn’t it belong to me.”

Page 25

“I would never know how it felt to walk boldly because this world wasn’t mine…There was no protection for me, a Black girl, no tender touch, no consideration for a delicate exterior. No space to scream.”

Page 31

“They bragged about their accomplishments in private, boasted about the difference between them and their brother. But skin quality and quantity of sleeve emblems aside, from neck to ankle, the men were identical.”

“Councilmen were the Order’s most decorated men. The talented, skilled, brilliant. Engineers, physicians, cryptographers, developers. But fundamentally they were soldiers. Killers.

Page 104

“And still, this country is better than it was when it was the United States. An economy outpaced by the rest of the world, the racial unrest, the increasing crime and abortion rates, no, we couldn’t go on with so much death.”

Page 133

“From his frame above the fireplace, Thomas Jefferson watched me. What had Sally seen in him? He brought her to France at fourteen, where she worked, lived, and earned money as a freed woman. When he decided to return to America two years later, she didn’t stay like the French urged her. She returned to America, where she remained enslaved, and the babies followed like footsteps.

Page 214

“Seven years of militias, fragmented state governments, and millions of deaths. We’re fortunate the Founders of the Order had a vision for the country. Their sacrifice ended the war.”

(Solenne’s great-grandfather wounded, and in the hospital, talks about that war and the aftermath.)

“In that unseasonably warm January of 1960 in Metairie, Louisiana, he witnessed a military dictatorship seamlessly replace the civil government. Where did these men come from, he asked his nurse. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Nobody knows, she said. They came from nowhere. But that wasn’t true, they were military officers police officers, senators, governors, a World War II veteran like Bastien’s grandfather. While my great-grandfather slept, Black and white men stood in offices letting the ink dry on treaties. In those documents women had fewer rights than they did before the war, and Black women caught the worst of it.”

[Black men were given the state of Louisiana as a free state, but they had to relocate by 1962 or accept the new Constitution]

Page 249

“They knew that once you get that taste of freedom nothing will keep you in line. Lucas [Bastien’s rival] knew it. I’d already seen the sunset over Sanibel Island in pink and orange. Seeing something like that makes you feel like somebody created something just for you. It was like unwrapping a present every time I blinked. I wanted to keep it forever. Not a piece of it. All of it.

Page 277

“Pleading. This was the only system designed for us. We were girls, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. We were our ancestors, forbidden to read or write while lying under the arms of men who drafted legislation.”

Page 293 Author’s Note

“It was difficult to read these stories of forgotten handmaids and their forced reproduction. Though the United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, slaveholders found a way to increase the slave population by exploiting the domestic slave trade. They forced Black women into men’s beds, punishing those who didn’t have multiple children by their teens and rewarding those who did.”

Who wins, Bastien or Solenne? Find out how they both win, and both lose. Clearly this book connects to the America that we live in now, in 2024. There is talk from time-to-time about the possibility of a second Civil War when discourse heats up or when rights are lost. Women’s rights recently experienced a setback in the Supreme Court, a setback that will figure in the upcoming election and that could escalate depending on the results of the next election. The fears of Black women, that they might become “concubines” if the right-wing wins must be quite real and harrowing. Throughout Rashad’s story of Solenne, she is writing a book about a slave from 100 years ago, Henriette (Kumba) drawing parallels between the two women’s lives, reminding us that Black women are not property or sexual objects and warning us about the dangers of allowing racism to rule ever again.

I feel a kinship to Rae Giana Rashad because I wrote a similar book about losing freedoms if America becomes an authoritarian state. She did a better job than I did since she had to create all her characters from scratch, and I used both real and fictional people. My attempt in this genre is entitled 2028: The Rebellion. Rashad is offering fair warning to everyone. You should read the book.

The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates – Book

When I post on Linkedin.com I often see posts from Bill Gates. Lately it seemed that he kept trying to get me (yes me personally ha-ha) to read The Moment of Lift, a recently published book by his wife Melinda Gates. Sometimes I leave billionaires out of my personal pursuits because their lives are so distant from mine that they don’t really feel like real people. It is exclusionary but I always figure they don’t really mind because it doesn’t impact their lives in any negative way and I am not real to them either. But prejudice in any form is probably not good for the soul and billionaires who are also philanthropists, trying to make life better in some way for all us on this tiny planet at the edge of this universe deserve some attention, even if it is just to see whether or not they are just making huge cosmic errors out of misguided arrogance. Now I am being arrogant. Anyway I read Mrs. Gates’ book and it really did give me a moment of lift, in fact more than one moment. When people use their huge fortunes to make a difference for people at the bottom of the economic heap it makes the inequalities of our current economy seem less obscene. And their experiences can teach us about realities in places we can’t afford to go.

I was deep into Chapter 3 of Gates’ book when Alabama decided to make abortion illegal in that state except in rare cases for the health of the mother. Melinda Gates was talking about the effect of women’s lack of control over their reproductive health and what a profound effect that has on the success of an entire family and even the village in which the family lives. If a women gets pregnant many times with little space in between it means she can’t pay proper attention to each child so the children often do not thrive. Infant mortality rates are really high in such cultures and the family is not able to progress, to send the children to school, to grow more crops or work harder to save money and the family does not thrive either. Generation after generation this is a reality that keeps families poor.

Gates was working in Africa and Asia, in countries where these patterns are very noticeable and small efforts can make a big difference. She began with finding ways to provide free vaccines to children. But she found that the mothers were begging to get regular access to contraceptives so they did not wear themselves out having baby after baby. Access to contraceptives is not something you might think would have such profound positive outcomes wherever it is available, but evidence shows us that it does.

So I cheated a bit and made use of Melinda’s new book to try to drum up readers for my recent blog post “Alabama and Melinda Gates” because I wanted to shine a light on what is happening with Roe v Wade.

https://www.thearmchairobserver.com/alabama-and-melinda-gates/

Melinda Gates is a very spiritual person. She is a devout Catholic who completed her college degrees at a Catholic college. But she is not a missionary. If she was about the business of spreading Catholicism she might not be so open to listening to women in the African and Asian places she visits, she might care more about fulfilling her own needs than the needs of the people she meets. However she has learned to let socially active people she meets at conferences and in her travels, people who know where to look in Africa and India to enlist the Foundation’s help for programs that already exist. These people become her mentors and they take her with them to meet the village people and see programs that are successfully allowing poor people around the world to have a future that is not simply a repeat of the lives people in that area have lived for generations, lives that can’t plan ahead, lives that can only get through each day and sometimes not even that.

There is no sense in talking about this as a work of literature. It is not intended to be considered in that way. But the book made me aware that not all billionaires are selfish people sailing around on yachts, drinking and dining at swanky restaurants, or building survival dwellings in isolated places. It gave me a lift to learn about the intimate problems of women on other continents (although we certainly have some of these problems on our own continent) and to hear about programs that were trying to lighten women’s loads and free them up to enjoy feeling that they could make personal contributions to their families and their culture, that life did not have to be drudgery and heartache or full of repetitive and difficult tasks that wear down the spirit.

So you might find that you also get to experience some of The Moments of Liftthat Melinda Gates offers in her book if you spend a few days immersed in the life of the wife of a billionaire. One more point – just because this book is mostly about the things women face does not mean that men should not read Gates’ book. Perhaps they need to hear about these issues even more that women do. Many women’s lives are still under the control of men, and men’s lives also change for the better when women become partners rather than property.

Photo Credit: From a Google Image Search – Goodreads