Required Reading

Blogger Candace Dodson Reed is back with her Most Fascinating People of Howard County, 2015 edition. You can find her at Is This Thing On?

Is This Thing On? she asks. Yes, it most definitely is. There's a crisp, off-the-cuff, no-messing-around quality to her writing that I find singularly refreshing. And if she weren't too busy living an actual life on multiple platforms--parenthood, career, community, politics, and more I'm probably forgetting--we might get to enjoy her blog more often.

Take a moment to read this piece. I found that I knew some people well, others not at all. And that means I learned something. Sometimes our personal (and even shared) worlds in Howard County are quite small. Reading this bumped out my boundaries. It also reminded me that, despite my belief that I am open to all kinds of people, on most days my world is starkly, almost completely white.

In the same vein, including Baltimore on this list is a brilliant reminder of all the ways we in Howard County have been challenged to look at race during 2015. Not just to look, but to stand up and join in. Ms. Dodson Reed has long been an advocate in Howard County for bringing folks together to examine attitudes on race. She's absolutely right that Baltimore is

Such a beautiful place (with beautiful people!) scarred by a history of complex social issues. As TS said, “bandaids won’t fix bullet holes”...

And absolutely right to include it in this list. We are not separate. We are interconnected in many, many ways.

There's a lot more I could say about the people on this list. But I don't want to get in the way of your actually reading the thing. So, do it. Then come back here and leave your thoughts if you are so inclined. It feels like a great conversation-opener to me.

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Separate and Unequal

Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not. It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...

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