By Ellen Mller
Moderator, Feminist Book Group
At the next meeting of the Feminist Book Group, we will continue our exploration of racism in the U.S. The meeting is on Friday, May 3, at 5:15 p.m. in the West Tisbury Public Library, and all are welcome. (We meet on the first Friday of every month.)
For more about the group, see this introductory post. The books we had originally suggested on this subject are
- So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo
- Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race, by Debby Irving
- White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo
In addition some of us are reading
- White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson
- Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi
- Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
- Women, Race and Class, by Angela Y. Davis.
- I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, by Austin Channing Brown
- This Will Be My Undoing, by Morgan Jerkins
Please read whatever appeals to you according to your life experience and interests. We had a wonderful discussion last month with a surprising amount of laughter considering the serious nature of the topic. Thank you to all of the 17 people who showed up and participated!
If you have not been to one of our meetings before, note that if you do not get to the library before it closes at 5 p.m., you need to enter through the program room door, which is off the porch in the back on the right side of the building. If you would like to bring a snack please do so, and bring any women friends you think might be interested, as well as your ideas for topics and books to read. (In choosing books to read as a group, we need to make sure they are still in print and readily available both through the library system and for purchase.)
Our mission is to inform ourselves about the history, legal, economic, and cultural issues confronting women today (particularly here in Massachusetts and on Martha’s Vineyard), and then to figure out how we can help effect change.
M.V. Women's Committee 
I notice you changed “affect” change into “effect” change in the mission statement below. I meant “affect” as in to do something with the intention of having an effect on something,… I just looked it up to make sure I used the word correctly… so thanks for the free edit, but that was not a typo. (I do make them regularly, but actually meant it as written.) Please note that I very much appreciate you posting this information. E ******************************************** “I must keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”Mary Oliver
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Right, but the original read “affect change,” not, say, “affect the status of women” or some existing condition. The goal is to effect change — to make change(s) happen. “Change” is an abstraction, so the notion of “affecting” it is a little vague. When I see “affect change” in the wild, “effect” or some other verb is almost always called for.
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