Anti-racist summer reading & travel

By Rebecca Garden

I love to time travel. I love to travel through time by reading history and novels that were written in times past. Time traveling through history can be an escape from the present — a present that feels like time has speeded up and is hurtling us through events that should be taking years and years (or not at all), an unfolding and unraveling of our democracy and our institutions and policies and ways of being together that we have worked so hard to build. Time itself seems to be unraveling when so many of these good things — the safeguards and benefits that were so hard-won and are meant to protect the most vulnerable among us and to provide opportunities for wellbeing, peace, and joyful flourishing for us all — have been “clawed back,” or, more accurately, stolen from us and destroyed. It feels like the whole concept of time is unspooling when we need an impact tracker to continually update the estimated deaths caused by the elimination of just one of the many programs (PEPFAR) designed to save lives lost to AIDS; when researchers can’t use the word “women” in a grant application; when the current administration is gutting our public health infrastructure, including on racialized health disparities.

All these things are happening, bubbling up through the news media, my work, social media, through almost every conversation that I have with friends and loved ones, and yet — it’s summer. The lake is breathtakingly beautiful, the woods are cool and alive with birds singing and nesting, the streets of the village of Cazenovia and the hamlet of New Woodstock are humming (or at least murmuring) with life. Yet these moments of peace and serenity are broken up, or maybe just braided in, with things like ramped-up climate anxiety and concern about how that’s impacting farmers and the cost of food for those who are struggling financially. 

As I drive through the countryside within the Town of Cazenovia, I wonder about the people who live here as recent immigrants and work on the dairy farms. I worry about how they are faring with the immigration sweeps that have caused so much grief for families and communities nearby in Sackets Harbor and in Watertown. Do they feel safe to go to the doctor when they need to? Are the kids OK at school? I worry about disabled people in this community. And even with the upswell of support, care, and belonging created by Cazenovia Pride, I worry about trans and other queer people in this community who may be at risk, now more than ever, due to the increase of attacks on them that are playing out in terrifying detail on the national scale. 

I think about lower-income people, people of minoritized faiths and people of color, particularly Black Americans and Native Americans, who encounter roadblock (the cost of renting and buying) after roadblock (not seeing other people who look like them or being treated with bias) when trying to find a place they can call home in Cazenovia. And then I get to the lake or the gorge trail or the Art Park or the bakery or hardware store, and I ease back into the peaceful ordinariness of the day. And when I drive home, I might listen to an audiobook on the way, a book that enables me to travel through time in a kind of escape from the present but that ultimately brings me back to the present in a way that is transformative.

The books that I’ve been reading (and listening to) this summer help me to see the present moment differently. They make me feel like we’ve wound back around to that earlier time. I’ve been reading novels that were written when our nation had just become a republic, books by Charles Brockden Brown, like Wieland and Arthur Mervyn. Brown wrote these novels in the 1790s when the American revolution was over, but politics were still roiling and epidemics of yellow fever swept through cities as ideas of liberty, equality, freedom, and justice were far from settled. People turned away from the highest ideals of the revolution, ideals that were moving toward true equality. They were driven by fear — they had witnessed the violence of war and the effects of deadly disease — and by the desire to hold onto or even increase the wealth they were gaining, the comfort and peace they had to fight to achieve. They were panicking about social change and new technologies and new ideas that shook their faith and made them wonder about the very nature of the social bond, the ideas, principles, and beliefs that are the basis for our sense of community and belonging. Am I describing the 1790s or 2025?

I have been time traveling in the other direction, into the near future, through the speculative fiction of Martha Wells’ The Murderbots Diaries, which deals with these same questions about what it means to belong to the human community and how we treat those who we feel are of a different class or somehow subhuman — in the way that people of color, disabled people, people of minoritized faiths, and rural, urban, and lower-income people have been treated. These lively and seemingly light novels, ideal for a summer read, unpack many of the same fears about how much our lives are controlled and constrained by those with wealth and power, by corporations and governments and the way that the prevailing governing forces can threaten and constrain us through tyranny.

Brown’s novel Wieland, like Murderbots, sets us afoot in plots where we don’t know whether or not to trust the information we get from the voices we thought we could trust (literally in Wieland, which involves ventriloquism). This kind of escapist time travel helps me to parse through the present moment when I feel like we’re living in a sci-fi novel or a summer thriller drenched in conspiracy, rather than a reality where people have abandoned trusted sources of data and information and are swept into hysteria that feeds into their willingness to deny, to unknow, to turn away from, or to deliberately cause cruelty.

I time travel through history, which is based on meticulously verified facts. I learn about the foundations of our society and constitutional democracy, which were forged in the heat of violent revolution, epidemics, and the forced displacement and enslavement of peoples. Learning about this nation during the years of slavery — through fine-grained histories like Combee, a history of Harriet Tubman’s role as a abolitionist and Civil War military leader — is essential to understanding what’s happening now nationally and in this small community around Cazenovia, where there is far more diversity in beliefs and politics than diversity in terms of identity, especially racialized identity. 

Thanks to my involvement with the Anti-Racism Coalition of Cazenovia, I have learned about the way that many in this community fought against the system of enslavement. One shining example is the 1850 Abolition Convention — a profoundly important two-day meeting of prominent Black and white abolitionists to raise awareness about the North’s complicity in slavery and to reject and resist the federal law that was passed requiring Northerners to assist in the capture and re-enslavement of people who had emancipated themselves, people who always should have been free. 

The abolitionists involved in the 1850 Convention in Cazenovia were not in the majority in that community. Black people were enslaved at Lorenzo, the estate that is central to Cazenovia’s self-image and its history (scroll down to Listening to the Lost Voices at Lorenzo Historic State Park). Much of the wealth and wellbeing in the North, including Central New York, depended on its economic and moral entanglements with slavery in the South. Given the willingness of many in CNY to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, the Black leaders of abolition encountered far more risk and are ironically less often remembered for leading the movement than white abolitionists. 

The Anti-Racism Coalition of Cazenovia’s annual commemoration of the 1850 Abolition Convention—which will take place this year on August 23, 2025, at 1 pm at 9 Sullivan Street and the First Presbyterian Church of Cazenovia — is a small but mighty opportunity to travel through time, or maybe dissolve the boundaries of time, to contend with the forces that have plagued us over time through love and connection. 

Please join us for this commemoration, where we can be anti-racist and abolitionist and pro-love and make community. We can do this in the ways that Black abolitionists did — by telling the stories that need to be heard and have been suppressed and by organizing practically through coalitions like the vigilance committees that forged bonds among different people through the shared commitment to rights, safety, wellbeing, peace, joy, and freedom. We can speculate about the future together, asking questions like: What do you wish for Cazenovia to do in order to continue this history of solidarity, the struggle for liberation and equity for all people? What else do we need to abolish? What risks do we need to take? What do we need to be courageous about?

Let’s time travel from the past into a future that we create for ourselves.