In Reckoning with Our Roots, Wynne tells the story of her love/hate relationship with the south. That ambivalence, she explains, began when she was 8 years old, when "the consequences of the Jim Crow south jumped up from my family's coffee table and slapped my young white face." A magazine cover photo caused that sting. It depicted men and women, with contorted faces, swinging chains threateningly at young black children, trying to integrate a school. National guardsmen stood with rifles between the children and the angry mob.
From that moment on, Wynne reports, she wrestled with the good, the bad, and the ugly of the southern experience—-its beautiful land, its deep sense of relationship, its gift of metaphor—-and its brutality of slavery, its horrors of lynching, its oppressive Jim Crow laws, and its denial of policies grounded in racism, sexism, and class.
The book recounts her journey to make sense of all those southern dichotomies, while inviting readers to reflect on their own cultural dualities. Such engagement, Wynne believes, can help all of us understand that the south's history is just one piece of the larger tapestry of an apartheid nation. She challenges us to unearth the country's past and present institutional tyranny, so we can ultimately come home to our nation's founding ideals.
Reckoning with Our Roots unstitches the notion that the Eurocentric narrative is the only story of America. Wynne claims it is just one of many stories that weave diverse strands into a collective, national whole. She contends that until all stories of cultural liberation create the cloth of our schools' curriculum and our lives, our country will continue to unravel the dream of democracy.
In this book, Wynne examines issues of power and privilege; white supremacy; the #MeToo Movement; the failure of schools to deliver quality education to marginalized students; the brilliance of the Algebra Project and the Young People's Project; the necessity for quality public schools for all; and the many lessons we can learn by listening to the young, and by studying Black scholars, the Southern Freedom Movement and the Black Liberation Movement of the African Diaspora.
