The Blacker the Berry, the Quicker They Shoot
Fear is real. Pain is real. Loss is real. Suffering is real.
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Posts Tagged: eric garner
A Time and a Place: Talking with Faylita Hicks
Faylita Hicks discusses her debut poetry collection, HOODWITCH.
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Turning and Turning: Jericho Brown’s The Tradition
[T]his is a book in direct conversation with literary tradition.
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The Inadvertent Postmodernist: A Conversation with Sarah Schulman
Author and activist Sarah Schulman discusses her forthcoming novel, MAGGIE TERRY.
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Rising Above the Rink: Remembering Bill Nunn
In those little moments, a higher truth emerges from above the rink: with some humor, peace becomes more possible.
...moreMore Reasons Why Beyoncé Is Great
If you make a visual album and get nominated for crazy amounts of awards, you should probably honor your performers. Beyoncé gets this (or her people do, which is close enough to the same thing), once again proving that she stands apart as an unbelievable performer and public figure. In case you didn’t catch the VMAs, Beyoncé made sure […]
...moreArtists Respond to the Violence
The violence of the past days has left the nation in a state of shock, and citizens are reacting with the full range of human responses to crisis. Many artists can be counted among those who demand we respond as a country to the violence against black bodies. To name a few: The Game and Snoop Dogg organized a protest against police brutality in […]
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Southern Girl: Beyoncé, Badu, and Southern Black Womanhood
None of the imagery of Lemonade is foreign to those of us who grew up in the South or who have Southern roots.
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The Recipe to Decolonized Love is in Beyoncé’s Lemonade
“There is a curse that will be broken,” she promises.
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R.I.P.: The Museum of Death
What strikes me is not the necrophilia or the fetal pigs or the spoon designed for scooping out human brain matter, but rather the mundane.
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The Rumpus Interview with Daniel José Older
Author Daniel José Older talks about his new novel, Shadowshaper, noir influence in urban fantasy, gentrification, white privilege and the publishing industry, and why we need diverse books, now more than ever.
...moreBaltimore: A Rumpus Roundup
On April 12th, four Baltimore bicycle police arrested 25-year-old Freddie Gray. Gray sustained injuries while in police custody. He asked for medical assistance repeatedly before slipping into a coma. A week later, he died.
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Return to Braggsville
Two authors take a trip that they did not take to a place that’s no place (but could be anywhere) in Wiley Cash’s feature on novelist T. Geronimo Johnson and his new book, Welcome to Braggsville.
...moreOutrage Laced With Vulnerability
When the grand juries failed to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo, they added to a lineage of injustices enacted against black people in America. Rumpus contributor Kaveh Akbar speaks to Claudia Rankine about her poetry collection Citizen, which explores the microaggressions supporting the system that let it happen: I didn’t have a directive in […]
...moreTurning to Baldwin During Tragedy
Art has to be a confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with […]
...moreScience Fiction Can Show Us How
In the wake of the events surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, science fiction can offer a particularly compelling alternative to illustrate a future without violence and inequality. Mary Hansen at Yes! talks with author and activist Walidah Imarisha, who coined the term “visionary fiction:” I think that science fiction and visionary fiction, […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, last week, men who have taken lives are walking away unpunished, unquestioned even. We have their victims’ names: Mike Brown. Eric Garner. We have their final words: Hands up, don’t shoot. (Six shots fired.) I can’t breathe. (Repeated until his breath is forever gone.) To stand with these two men is to go […]
...moreEric Garner: A Rumpus Roundup
In July, unarmed black man Eric Garner died after he was placed in a chokehold by a white police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, on Staten Island, a suburban borough of New York City. This might sound eerily similar to the case of Michael Brown. Or similar to Akai Gurley. Or to any of the hundreds of […]
...moreFerguson: A Rumpus Roundup
Early in August, unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. While protests broke out in the weeks following Brown’s death, Wilson remained free, awaiting a grand jury indictment. Grand juries decide whether or not a crime has been committed, not […]
...moreFerguson, Personally
Rembert Browne flew to Ferguson last week. Out of interest in the town’s newfound notoriety, the crowds contesting it, and the general ennui surrounding Contemporary Black Youth, the usual-sports writer compiled the meat of his thoughts in an essay for Grantland: The history of being black in America is the history of nonviolence versus “fight […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
The news of Michael Brown’s death cannot be ignored. When one of our young people dies from shots fired by a police officer, there will be sadness and confusion. There will inevitably be questions, and questions left unanswered will lead to anger. This is a week, perhaps, when we need fiction and art to help […]
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