{"product_id":"steps-we-take","title":"Steps We Take","description":"\u003cp\u003eEllen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e. She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. \"Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location,\" she observes in \u003ci\u003eThe Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. \u003c\/i\u003eAs a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern—make that American—white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white \"segregation academies,\" a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSlate\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eForbes \u003c\/i\u003eand other publications. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Steps We Take \u003c\/i\u003etells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University Press of Mississippi","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56491882348888,"sku":"9781496847751","price":25.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781496847751_f16ddf80-9174-4991-a8df-b2f55386a4c8.jpg?v=1770211860","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/steps-we-take","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}