These United States
Can we talk about pet peeves? I have three right now: the first is blog posts that air pet peeves, so I plead guilty as I enter troubled territory. More troubled, though, is the territory inhabited by folks represented in my reading this month:
- The Ground Breaking (Dutton 2022) by Scott Ellsworth (nonfiction), an historian’s search for the bodies of the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and this month’s selection of The Flyer Book Club.
- What Trammels the Heart (Stephen F. Austin University 2025) by Kelly Fordon (poetry), a journey through lives scarred by sexual abuse, especially that perpetrated on children by Roman Catholic priests (stay tuned for a review).
- The Lion Women of Teheran (Gallery Book 2024) by Marjan Kamali (fiction), a novel about two girls growing up in the Iran of the 1950’s–1980’s, and the 2026 selection of the Tulsa City County Library’s One Book, One Tulsa program.
- Sunshine Nails (Atria 2023) by Mai Nguyen (fiction), a debut novel telling the story of a Vietnamese family in Toronto who struggles to sustain their family business, a nail salon, in an anti-immigrant and hyper-commercial environment.
Only two of these books are set in the U.S. (The Ground Breaking and What Trammels the Heart) but all four reflect pressing U.S. concerns. Sunshine Nails could be set equally effectively in any U.S. city. The Lion Women of Teheran takes place against a background of recent history apparently disregarded in the current U.S. war of choice. My reading list delivers a partial catalog of peoples devalued and victimized in the dominant U.S. culture: Blacks, Asians, Middle-Easterners, and those who become targets of sexual abuse. Many more could be added: Native peoples, immigrants, those claiming various sexual preferences and identities, and others.
This brings me to my second pet peeve: referring to the U.S. as “America.” Recently I have developed an allergy to the word, not just because of its inclusion in a tired acronym, revived on steroids from the Reagan era (I thought we were past that) but because its egregious geographical inaccuracy erases the identities of 34 sovereign nations and the many ethnicities and cultural traditions they encompass, along with their distinct experiences of the world.
When we choose not to acknowledge others with whom we share land, water, and human identity, we fabricate a world that favors us and places us at the head of the line. Each implicit failure to recognize Mexico, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Brazil as America fuels the sort of U.S. exceptionalism that erases ethnicities, religious affiliations, economic alternatives, and sexual identities we find inconvenient, distasteful, or discomfiting. Identifying “America” as the U.S. devalues those whom the dominant culture ignores.
Our self-centered worlds are too small, and so are our ideas of what constitutes a human being, a nation, and the common good. Thus I arrive at my third pet peeve, finally clearing the air. Lately I have heard countless friends and acquaintances say, “I don’t read or listen to the news anymore. I just can’t. It’s too depressing.” Well, I get it, and I don’t disagree about the depressing impact of all that’s going on. It’s tempting to look away, each of us retreating to our self-constructed worlds. But this month’s reading points me in another direction.
I read Sunshine Nails on an airplane between Dallas and San Francisco. It’s a simple story and a quick read. But that small expense of time required me to view the world with compassion from the vantage of an immigrant family watching the erosion of their wealth and opportunity. Turning to The Lion Women of Teheran, I encountered the crushing brutality of an actual modern, repressive regime, more terrifying than any invented horror story. The book features events eerily similar to those that have begun to appear in local U.S. news. Kelly Fordon’s gripping poetry in What Trammels the Heart depicts how silence and shame abet the devastation authorized by a hierarchical institutional structure and its religious ideology. These stories surround me with evidence of the wreckage the U.S. now experiences and delivers to the rest of the world. Is there a way out?
Reading Scott Ellsworth’s book with the Flyer Book Club helps me to see a path. (I have written before about the Tulsa Flyer and its book club. If you haven’t checked them out, please do.) Published in 2021 on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, The Ground Breaking unspools Ellsworth’s patient and systematic search to find and name the massacre’s victims. Even more, it illustrates how, by his determination to tell the truth, a white man earned the trust of many in Tulsa’s Black community and even of some implicated in the massacre. Ellsworth puts his feet on the ground and seeks out (then tests, corroborates, and evaluates) stories from ordinary people. His role on the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission continues today. He refuses to look away.
The Ground Breaking recounts a story crucial to Tulsa’s self-understanding. At the Flyer Book Club’s May meeting, many admitted that, while they knew about the Tulsa Race Massacre before reading Ellsworth’s book, they did not know the extent to which Tulsa’s cover-up continues today and hampers efforts to learn the truth about what happened more than a century ago. The Tulsa Race Massacre isn’t history. It’s our present and our future. Its influence shapes our daily interactions whether we realize it or not. I learned in our meeting that the street where I have lived for twenty-eight years is named for a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Silence enables the massacre’s damage to persist. It suppresses our awareness and appreciation of difference, fueling the concrete economic and social challenges that immigrants face. The enforcement of silence by repressive regimes and hierarchical religious institutions authorizes brutality and abuse. So, while not meaning to, we participate in such enforcement when we choose to avoid hearing and reading about bad news. Turning away from disaster is a natural, human impulse that serves a legitimate need for self-protection but when taken too far, it makes us complicit in injuries rooted in the past that reverberate into the future.
There’s more to breaking the silence than speaking out. People need to be heard. Douglas Steere (1901-1995), a Quaker theologian and ecumenist, coined the phrase, “we hear each other into speech.” Grounded in the Quaker practice of waiting for each other to speak, Steere articulates a profound truth: disclosure only happens when someone is listening. Empathic listening not only increases the amount of information people share, it registers biologically. When a listener attends comprehensively to someone else’s speech, it synchronizes electrical impulses in the speaker and listener, lowers levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and releases oxytocin, a hormone that strengthens bonds of trust. Ellsworth’s research methodology rests on his determination to listen, which spurred the city of Tulsa’s recent decision to excavate at Oaklawn Cemetery and exhume bodies found in unmarked graves. Listening makes a practical, concrete difference.
As I have admitted, I write my complaints as a guilty party: my pet peeve rant is the sort that usually annoys me. I often slip and say “America” when I mean the U.S. and therefore suffer the blindness that this moniker enforces. I, too, click away from journalism that disturbs me when I feel I can’t endure any more bad news. Still, while sitting in a room with the Tulsa Flyers, I notice a shift. In the presence of informed others, things look different. None of us knows what to do but we agree that more must be done, and that we can’t do it alone.
We can’t afford to look away. But we can listen. I still lack a road map but when I look my fellow citizens in the face and listen to their perspectives I am better able to confront the difficult realities we face. It’s not an answer but it’s a beginning. For me, it’s the first step toward achieving a larger vision for these United States.
