Charleston
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Three Flash Fictions by Niyah Morris
The lasso was a gaping mouth that opened wide enough, we hoped, to swallow the cloud.
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Two Extraordinary Books: Bullets into Bells and Inquisition
The obscenities and tragedies of American life pile up with speed, and in quantities, that are appalling.
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The Rumpus Interview with Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau discusses her essay, “Know Your Rights!” from the collection, The Fire This Time, what she loves about motherhood, and why it’s time for White America to get uncomfortable.
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Post-Election Dispatch: Charleston, SC
Right now as I write this, smoke from fires in the southeastern Appalachian Mountains haze the morning. We’re under orange alert—the air quality bad enough that schoolchildren will stay indoors today. This morning the coastal flooding is up again thanks…
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America Again
I felt urgently that it was the moment to tell the story of what I’ve learned about American music—or maybe about being an American.
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I’ll Fly Away: Notes on Economy Class Citizenship
I want to break from a continued and systematic white supremacy so pervasive it is entrenched in the vernacular I use to express myself.
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What You See
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book Between the World and Me is a letter addressed to his son that America needs to read. New York profiles the author, whose fearless writing about race continues to hold readers accountable to history: Coates’s writing…
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This Week in Short Fiction
In the wake of the Charleston church shooting last week and with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev back in the news, the world seems full of nothing but hate and intolerance, violence, and terror. But as families of the Charleston…
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Roxane Gay on Forgiveness
In a powerful New York Times op-ed, Roxane Gay explains why she does not forgive the Charleston shooter: Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative…
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Claudia Rankine and #BlackLivesMatter
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality…
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Evil Loves Tomorrow
What I do know is that love reckons with the past and evil reminds us to look to the future. Evil loves tomorrow because peddling in possibility is what abusers do. At my worst, I know that I’ve wanted the…
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My Mother Would Be Right
But seeing them beating that man on television, it must have scared me so deep, in a place so hidden, that I didn’t even know about it. My brain kept playing as though I were a regular teenager. But my…