The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning

Potential Book Club Questions

Order

1.Did a particular chapter of the book resonate the most with you?
2. What is the chapter that you identified with the most personally?
3. Any chapter that, although it didn’t track your own experience, laid bare a truth that you identified with on a deeper related level?
4. Is there a particular scene that has stuck with you?
5. Is there anything that surprised you about the book?
6. If you renamed the book, what would be your title?
7. Have you felt you were performing a script sometimes? How about the level of effusive cheerfulness that’s baseline in Mississippi public exchanges? 8. Have you ever been surprised to find yourself the memory keeper, the one holding memories when others have departed, either via death or just moving on to another life chapter?
9. How is your school story American history, a racial, gender and/or class one? Does it reflect a facet of success (that’s important to tell too)? A kind of inequality?
10. How does your volunteer path reflect the evolution of you and the times?
11. What’s your experience with reckoning with whiteness and racial failure, whether through your participation, being impacted by either or witnessing both over your lifetime?
12. Can you think of a reckoning project along the lines of The Admissions Projects (www.admissionsprojects.com) that you could organize to shed a light on racism or the marginalization of others in another way?