Nonfiction books are one of the best tools for seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. They allow us to get an idea of the experiences of people of all different ages, races, genders, abilities, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, or even just people with different opinions than ours. Is there a book you read this year from a diverse author, or a book that opened your eyes to a perspective that you hadn’t considered? How did it challenge you to think differently?
For this challenge I’m picking three books I read this year that each put a twist on common ways of thinking about their topic.
The Quiet Damage covers in detail how five families got drawn into the QAnon movement. The families are entirely different.
They were:
- an elderly woman from Alabama
- a formerly liberal lawyer
- a rural Christian man
- a Bernie Sanders supporter
- a Black woman whose sister is a Black Lives Matter activist
The book shows with compassion how they were drawn into the movement and how some of them were moved out. It is a great book for people like me who couldn’t understand how people could fall for this. I particularly liked the section at the end talking about what can be done to prevent this happening again.
The truth is that the truth is almost beside the point. Facts alone won’t fix this. To get bogged down in debunking falsehoods is to tackle the symptom not the cause. What we’re facing is as much a wellness crisis as it is a disinformation crisis. Our interventions need to reflect that.
“If you are feeling uncertain. If you are feeling a lack of control. If you are feeling socially isolated. If you are feeling helpless and searching for answers because answers will make you feel better then media literacy won’t help you. You’ll throw it all out the window.”
Dr. Joanne Miller – University of Delaware
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is registered with her Native nation. She didn’t grow up around her small nation’s homeland and feels slightly disconnected from them. Now she is adult with children and is deciding whether to enroll them. This is the springboard to discuss the many ways that Native nations use to decide who is a member and who isn’t. Sometimes they decided this and sometimes these rules were put upon them by the U.S. government.
It leads to a lot of discussion about what makes your identity. Is it all genetics? It is the culture that you grew up in? Can you choose your identity? When everyone has different rules, how do you decide what is right?
In the United States we tend to hear a lot about missionaries going to “the jungle.” We don’t hear the other side. Nemonte grew up in a village under the rule of a Christian missionary. There was a tension between the material goods that the white people could offer her and the life that her family could live in the forest.
As an adult Nemonte became involved in environmental activism. She is helping indigenous communities fight against the oil companies by organizing to protect their lands. Some of their resistance includes relearning how to live on the land by using the skills that the missionaries tried hard to make them forget.
