When I was young, my parents took our family to Haiti during the summers. For them, it was a homecoming. For my brothers and I it was an adventure, sometimes, a chore, and always a necessary education on privilege and the grace of an American passport. …more

At Guernica, Randa Jarrar writes about this one time when she tried to visit her sister in Palestine and she was deported by Israel.

I was so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult time imagining the rest of my trip. I would picture myself walking around Ramallah with my sister, or attending a concert, or visiting my aunts, or seeing the separation wall, or staying at the American Colony Hotel for an evening, and I would draw a blank. There was a wall there, too, between my thoughts and Palestine.

John Scalzi tries to explain privilege to straight white men without invoking the word privilege.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

Julianna Baggott’s Pure is about a post-apocalyptic world where the responsibility for changing and saving civilization lies with children.

…more

We all know the common fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman—rarely, if ever, do we see stories about a woman and a woman or a man and a man—who must overcome some obstacle to reach happily ever after. …more

A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track. …more

I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong. …more

Here we are again.

In the New York Times Book Review, Meg Wolitzer takes up the matter of “women’s fiction,” in her essay, “The Second Shelf.” She does a fine job of addressing the ongoing, fraught conversation about men, women, the books we write and the disparity in the consideration these books receive. …more

Oftentimes when having difficult conversations about complex topics, certain kinds of people (the small-minded, feeble-minded, profoundly ignorant, etc.) will try to derail the conversation. …more

Lately, I read the news and have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We are having a national debate about abortion, birth control and reproductive freedom, and men are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire. …more

Yesterday I clicked on a link from my Twitter feed that took me to a YouTube video about  a man named Jason Russell and his son and then I realized that the video was in fact about Joseph Kony and a decades old conflict in Uganda only Kony is no longer in Uganda and the conflict has been going on for decades. I also learned about the nonprofit foundation Invisible Children and by the end, I wasn’t sure if I appreciated or hated what I had just seen but I went to the Kony 2012 website and was prepared to contribute some money because I’m opposed to child kidnapping, murder, torture and the other atrocities Kony has committed over the years. I was also inspired by the enthusiasm of the people in the video who seemed committed to creating change even if their approach struck me as somewhat shallow and improbable.

The website is quite slick and the Kony 2012 campaign is quite slick but as I was entering my credit card information I paused because something kept nagging me.

…more

VIDA has once again released their count, where they look at prominent magazines and identify the gender breakdown of writers, reviewers, and books reviewed. Once again, the numbers are revealing.

Do you know what you’re saying? Do you really? …more

Since writing “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” I have started paying more attention to how the media reports on sexual abuse and rape cases, the ways the media frames these issues, and how they report on the victims. I’ve noticed that there is often some kind of qualification about the victim (and certainly, this is not new), where we learn about what the victim was wearing or drinking, or that it was late at night or that there was partial consent or that the victim comes from an economically depressed community—information that should bear no relevance whatsoever. These qualifications often seem to imply that criminal acts are somehow justifiable. It is disconcerting, at best.

It’s been about a year since I wrote that essay and I’m still thinking a lot about language, its limitations, and how we often stumble when trying to find the right language to write about the complex issues of sexual abuse and rape.

I’ve been following the growing sexual abuse scandal in Los Angeles at Miramonte Elementary School with real sadness.

…more

It’s just that damn, every month feels like black history month. Black people get everything. Why is it wrong to feel white pride? Black people also get their own TV station–they have BET while white people only have ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the CW, and the hundreds of other television networks. It’s ridiculous that we’re going to have to hear about black people for a whole 29 days of the shortest month of the year. That doesn’t seem fair, man. It just doesn’t.

I mean, we like black people, mostly, but we don’t want to have to think about them or anything, not for a whole month, that is just too much. Also, it’s pretty obvious that white people accomplish far more and greater things so, you know…. Can you imagine the “fits” black people would throw if white people had a history month other than January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December?

Also, black people have a president and they are no longer slaves. Are they ever satisfied? When you think about it, it is rather racist that black people get a history month and Hispanic people get a history month while white people only get a white history year, every single year, since beginning of time. It doesn’t matter that history as a cultural concept has historically been synonymous with white history. The word “year” has fewer letters than “month” so it is just is not fair at all.

But we are not racist, okay? WE ARE NOT RACIST. Just sayin’.

So yes, this  lament over the lack of a white history month is really a thing.

Alex Gilvarry’s From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Viking) is an original, smart, and incisive novel about a Filipino fashion designer, Boyet Hernandez, who is held at Guantanamo Bay after authorities discover his ties to an alleged terrorist, Ahmed Quereshi, the man who funded Boyet’s fashion label. …more

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. …more

The most frustrating part of not being able to keep quiet about the willful ways in which people are perfectly happy to enable the status quo is that when you voice concerns about the lack of diversity in any given arena, you are automatically positioned as that person, the shrill and humorless obsessive who simply cannot let things be. …more

The measure of excellence is a pursuit with which writers and critics are often intensely concerned. At the end of each year any number of magazines and organizations issue a list or series of lists to quantify the year’s best books, stories, poems, and essays. …more

The horrifying crisis unfolding at Penn State reminds us, yet again, of the carelessness of language used when we write about sexual violence.

In an AP article printed in the New York Times the headline reads, “2 Top Officials Step Down Amid Penn State Sex Scandal.” In countless other articles across far too many publications, journalists have also used the phrase “sex scandal” to refer to Penn State’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, allegedly raping and otherwise sexually abusing at least eight young boys.

A sex scandal is when, for example, a politician has an extramarital affair with a young female intern or when an evangelist preacher has an extramarital affair with a young masseur or another politician has a history of visiting escorts. In any such situation, there is (consensual) sex involved and the circumstances within which that sex was had are scandalous.

When we are talking about rape, sexual abuse, or sexual assault, and/or when these terrible acts of sexual violence occur between adults and children, we are talking about scandals of sexual violence. They are rape scandals, sexual abuse scandals, or sexual assault scandals but they are not sex scandals. Sex is consensual. Rape, sexual abuse, and sexual assault, as well as violent sexual acts forced upon children by adults are not consensual. …more

Life is the one disaster that is also a miracle. Or perhaps life is the one miracle that is also a disaster. …more

When I was a kid, I loved participating in my school’s science fair each year even though I did not necessarily have any aptitude for the scientific.

My experiments were never that inspiring but I certainly thought they were—volcanoes erupting with the magical properties of food coloring, baking soda, and vinegar, a suspension bridge made out of balsa wood and kite string that could hold a heavy brick, a microscope set up with a dark red smear of my blood on a carefully prepared slide—simple experiments that made me feel like I had accomplished something innovative, even in the face of the far bolder experiments around me. …more

When my brothers and I …more

Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension. …more

This is a vocabulary-based reference for Roxane Gay’s recently published “Still With the Scarlet Letters”

Definitions of Key Terms: …more

Last week journalist Mac McClelland wrote a brutal, exceptional essay for Good where she plainly discussed her experience with PTSD and her desire for violent sex as one means of coping with the atrocities she had witnessed as a human rights reporter. Early in the essay, McClelland writes about being in Haiti. As a Haitian American, I immediately tensed and worried about what she might say. …more

Blake Butler is the author of There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books, 2010), and Ever (Calamari Press, 2009). …more

I stopped counting when I reached eighteen moves. That was a few moves ago. I am very good at packing my life into boxes. …more

There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are, I suppose, matters of scale. I read an article in the New York Times about an eleven-year old girl who was gang raped by eighteen men in Cleveland, Texas. …more

ACT ONE

Scene: DEREK*, is in his early thirties with a military haircut, moderately toned flab, and tinted eyeglasses. He grabs the 50-pound barbells from the weight room rack and groans awkwardly …more

(or Seven Things White People Have Really Said to Me Since November 4, 2008)

…more