EMPATHY ONLINE
July 2 discussion will focus on bestselling book ‘So you want to talk about race’
KINGSTON, N.Y. » A community book-reading initiative to discuss the harm of systemic and structural racism, sidetracked by the COVID-19 pandemic, has found a new home. It will go virtual Thursday, July 2.
Ijeoma Oluo’s 2018 New York Times bestseller, “So You Want
To Talk About Race” is the subject of Kingston Reads!, a project led by a small group of Kingston school district employ- ees in collaboration with Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston and Radio Kingston.
The initiative comes at a critical time as the demand for police reform and social justice sees movement under nationwide Black Lives Matter rallies. A fourth BLM gathering is planned July 1 on Academy Green in Kingston.
Using the same format as a book club, the first third of the book will be discussed online via Zoom Meetings from 5-6 p.m. Thursday, with subsequent sections July 16 and 30.
Radio Kingston, which received permission from Oluo, narrator Bahni Turpin and Blackstone Audio, has been airing a chapter every weeknight at 6 p.m. since June 22. Monday’s broadcast features chapter 6.
The discussion will be moderated by Kingston High School Assistant Principal Kathy Ann Sellitti, Amy Kapes, a social worker at the high school, and
Charlotte Kinstlinger-Adamis, the librarian at J. Watson Bailey Middle School, along with Amanda MacMillian Stromoski, who coowns Rough Draft with her husband, Anthony.
“We are not the voice. We are just the conduit,” Adamis said.
In the short time since it was announced, 300 books paid for by an anonymous donor have been distributed at Rough Draft. Additional copies can be reserved and purchased at a 10 percent discount by submitting an online request at roughdraftny.com/ kingstonreads. People are also able to “pay forward,” buying a copy for someone
who isn’t able to purchase it themselves. Community members are also welcome to ask for pay-itforward copies at the register at Rough Draft.
A limited number of loaner copies are also available at the YMCA of Kingston and Ulster County and the audiobook can be purchased through Libro.fm, an affiliate of Rough Draft.
“Clearly, there’s tremendous interest in this,” Adamis said.
“We just deeply care about bringing the members of our community up to speed and not making it a problem for people of color,” she said. “They’re exhausted by living in a racist society. We feel like it’s really very important that we take this work on. Anybody can join us, but that’s what this first book is about.”
To register for the July 2 live discussion, visit the KingstonReads Facebook Event page or Rough Draft’s website. Participants will get a Zoom link. They must register for each session. Registration opens at least one week prior to the event.
The event will also be recorded, with portions of the audio possibly used for future rebroadcast on Radio Kingston.
Sellitti, Kapes and Adamis do not represent the school district in this endeavor, but the trio have all been involved in school-related studies of the book. “So You Want To Talk About Race” was read in the high school during the 2018-19 school year and Adamis led an in-service development study with 18 faculty members at Bailey
this past February and March, finishing just before the pandemic hit.
“That’s why we came together, thinking we need to do this as a community read,” Adamis noted.
“It’s a really good starting place,” she said. “That’s why we picked it for our schools and that’s why we thought it would be an excellent starting place for the community, because it really is a conversation and it really does introduce people to get a foundational-level understanding of what the problem is and how we as white people can begin to examine ourselves.”
The original plan was for people to read the book in March and have in-person discussions at Rough Draft in April, but that was twice postponed, then cancelled
by the pandemic.
After the May 25 killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis touched off the protests, Stromoski reached out to the others to revive Kington Reads!
“Our community needs to have a conversation like right now,” Adamis said. “It all happened pretty quickly. We already had everything figured out. It was more a matter of, ‘OK, how do we do this online? How do we do this in a socially distant, responsible way?’
“Jimmy Buff (Executive Director at Radio Kingston) came to (Stromoski) at some point over the last couple of weeks and that’s how he got permission to play the audio recordings,” Adamis added. “We look at that as a wonderful synchronicity there.
“If we are to move forward into meaningful right action, white people need to step up their game,” she said. “They need to know what their biases are. They need to know what is really going on and they need to understand what is structural racism. How has our silence contributed?
“What can we do? It really begins with education. It does not end there,” Adamis added. “I think it’s really important that reading a book is great. We want you to read. We want you to listen, but you’ve got to take it beyond that if you’re really going to be an ally.
“We have to consciously educate ourselves. That’s how we can be better allies,” she said. “That’s our objective: to be better allies in the fight for Black Lives Matter.”