Clotel; or, The President's Daughter was chosen as our book for September by Mohammad for our monthly book reading that we've been conducting every month since March. I have completed and exceeded my goal of finishing 10 books in the year 2020 purely because of this reading habit we've cultivated together, and I cannot be more thankful. I can't wait to complete 20 books (hopefully!) before December. But, I digress.
This book is a solemn reminder of the brutality of the past. I could not go a page in this novel without thinking of the blatant violence towards Black bodies today, and how intrinsic racism has grown in our political, education, financial and otherwise administrative lives. Capitalism truly is the devil, and racial capitalism has been a hard fought profit that white people have exploited multiple of centuries, on multiple types of bodies: Black, African, Latinx, Hispanic, Brown, Desi, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Asian Americans, Asians outside of Asia, Asians within Central Asia, Pacific Islander, Asians outside of the Pacific Islands... And the list is IN-exhaustive, as it is consistently being added and updated upon by more and more killings by government-sanctioned bodies supposed to protect us, allowed by this weird, pacifist, clinical and disembodied, white supremacy neutrality.
The novel does nothing but solidify that unarguable fact made so by the very blood and ravage done upon the soil by white men of the past, and continued by the white men of the future by racial profiling and racial discriminations, amongst many other intersections of discriminations so prevalent and relevant in my short 23 years of being alive.
The book is about Thomas Jefferson was one of the founding fathers of the 30-70 founding fathers, which included Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams etc., or rather, about his bloodline through his "illegitimate" child, Clotel, and her struggles and racism that she faced in life personally, as well as that of Clotel's mother, and Clotel's subsequent children. This is a multi-generational account of the reality in which America is so fond to romanticize, and should be read in schools, so as to give an accurate depiction of the stripping away of humanity and the normalization of such inhuman violences done upon men by fellow men, because of the color of their skin. It's shameful. And disgusting. And all the more horrible knowing full well these accounts are true, and probably only skim the surface of how god awful life was 60-70 years ago, how awful life has been since for Black lives and Black perspectives, Black academics and Black self-determination efforts and community improvements.
We need to do better. And you can start by reading this book at your own pace; but please, absorb what you're reading, imagine the scenario, the complete and utter degradation, and then, when you've finished reading the last chapter and close your eyes to imagine the last passage one more time, when you're finally ready to open your eyes literally and metaphorically, I hope you see the world awash anew, with hope, strength, and resilience, and most of all, that you are not alone in this fight against hopelessness, against this broken system of serving corporations rather than the people. Because with every person picking this book up and reading it for the first time, and then sitting down and quietly reflecting about their own internal narrative and biases, means that one more person is now aware of the everyday injustices that non-white folks, ESPECIALLY Black folks, have to go through. That one more person can inspire change within their own social circles. And that's how hope spreads.
Be kind, make compassionate choices today, and read this book.
5/5
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