You’re cracking up over there!<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> I am!<\/p>\n

Jeanie:<\/strong> Tell me what you’re thinking.<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> Just the, “I know reverse racism doesn’t exist, but…”<\/p>\n

You know it’s never going to go in a good place after that. I just know that. And literally the line right after you stopped reading Juliet kind of says, as the narrator, “I didn’t really know what was wrong from what they said, but it felt weird.”<\/p>\n

And I want to acknowledge that. It’s so valid. I love that she shares that with the reader.<\/p>\n

And I think it also reminds me of the magic that we have, right? Our intuition, how Juliet maybe hasn’t read a book about privilege and whiteness and white supremacy, but she knew in her bones, in her gut, in her heart, her soul that what just happened wasn’t right, you know. She didn’t need that academic training on the topic to know it, right?<\/p>\n

And just a few pages after that, Harlowe gets in the car, with Zaira and some others, and she had just talked to some white women who were fawning over her writing–<\/p>\n

Jeanie:<\/strong>\u00a0–and Harlowe is a white woman, a white writer.<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> Exactly. And she sits in the car. I think she’s the only white woman in the car. Everyone else is a woman of color after this session and she’s just kind of like humphing. And Juliet talks about how she’s all pointy and all edges and very sharp, you know? She’s just making the stink, right? And how a lot of times white women, white feminists, white queer feminists can’t really acknowledge that racism still exists right now, still, in all of us day-to-day in our interactions we’re witnesses to it and we’re perpetrators of it, right?<\/p>\n

Jeanie:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> And I say that as a person who’s half-white, half-Latinx, super white-passing, right?I’m totally part of the problem *and* experience it sometimes. And so, it’s a real thing. And I love the way that Gabby Rivera walks us through this because it’s so dally. *laughs* And the way that Juliet makes meaning of it? Because she doesn’t have all the words and all the jargon but she totally gets it in her gut. That what happened was wonky, right?<\/p>\n

Jeanie:<\/strong> Right. And we’re so used to being centered in our histories, in the literature that we read in school and out of school, in the news, on television and movies. So suddenly when our experience isn’t centered or when we’re asked to, you know, stay a little quieter, make a little space — and I say that we as a white woman, me “we” — when we as white folks are asked to do that, it pinches. I think it takes a lot of self-awareness and practice to get used to being like, “Oh, other people experiences all the time and we don’t even ask it of them, it just happens.”<\/p>\n

You’re making me think of something. I am a very novice meditator. I should meditate more, probably. But when, you know, when I’m learning meditation, when I’m focusing on meditation, one of the things is when your mind wanders –which it will — the work, the practice is really about coming back to the present moment, right? And so, what you’re making me think about is the practice here is about like, “Oh, there’s my fragility again.”<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> Yes, it’s the noticing and naming, just like in meditation, right?<\/p>\n

Jeanie:<\/strong> And that comes back to pronouns.<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

Jeanie:<\/strong> When we mess up, it’s the noticing and the naming. Oh, I so appreciate the way you’re reading this together for me.<\/p>\n

So Juliet, besides going to Writers Workshops with cool people and other social events around. Portland also has a job to do and one of her tasks is to investigate this, like, weird collection of paper slips with the names of powerful women on them that Harlowe has collected. And one of the women she seeks out is Lolita Lebr\u00f3n. She’s at the local library where there’s a bit of a love interest, that was really fun to read about! And she gets really angry because she didn’t know about Lolita Lebr\u00f3n who is a Puerto Rican revolutionary. She gets like, ticked. She’s like, “How do my family never talk to me about this? My Puerto Rican family, where is this story? How did I never learn it?”<\/p>\n

It reminded me, at the Middle Grades Conference, a teacher in the room asked some Edmunds Middle School students who were presenting on equity, “What could adults do to support them in their activism?”<\/p>\n

And one of the students responded, “How come nobody ever teaches us about inequity? I wish adults would teach us about what is going on in the world.” And so, I’m just curious about how you reacted to the Lolita Lebr\u00f3n’s section.<\/p>\n

Dolan:<\/strong> Yes, it’s so real. We don’t realize how much we’re centering white people in our history and in our pedagogy until we read something else. And it’s like, “Oh, my God, how did I not know?”<\/p>\n