race
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Seeing (and Gazing On) Black Twitter
In the existing ways that our fashion, speech and music are ripped from our bodies and plastered as spectacle, this otherwise radical platform becomes a tool of injustice and control. This is the shortcoming of inviting the white gaze. While…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) It’s dubious whether these parents read either book. It’s not personal, it’s just privileged. Fact-checking the infamous nail salon story. Being bored in…
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Complements to the Canon
Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) writes for Seven Scribes on the experience of discovering novels by black writers to act as a necessary complement to reading Harper Lee’s reductive portrayals of race in Mockingbird and Watchman: These books, this canon, represented…
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Dear White Men, Publish Responsibly
For Electric Literature, Adalena Kavanagh has a conversation with poet Elisa Gabbert on Google Chat about how to advise white male writers to publish ethically. Their conversation also explores topics related to power structures in the publishing industry, and the implications of white authors…
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Mulatto, Mulatto, Mulatto
At BuzzFeed, Mat Johnson breaks down the logistics of an oft-ignored, always tumultuous descriptor for multiethnic folks everywhere: I know that many people, they hear mulatto, and they think of the word mule. This is often the first complaint I hear…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tamara Winfrey-Harris
The reality is that there is privilege even within social justice movements.
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The Summer of White Authors
The New York Times‘s summer reading list has hit peak whiteness. The Gawker Review of Books has been tracking the Times‘s summer reading list and while the last few years have seen the list hover around 90% white authors, the 2015 list…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Never Really Alone
Blood and smoke and broken windows aren’t the only images out of Baltimore (though they sure do get good ratings).
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Intersections, On the Anniversary of the Rodney King Rebellion
The city has risen up in response, and rebellion is taking many forms.
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The 2014 VIDA Count
The 2014 VIDA Count is in, this time including the first annual Women of Color VIDA Count. While the results of the VIDA Count show a general trend toward gender parity, the results of the WOC VIDA Count, though incomplete,…
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Writing While Black
The publishing industry is 89% white. That isn’t the only problem when it comes to race and literature. BuzzFeed’s new Literary Editor Saeed Jones reflects on the issue in the publishing industry: When literary gatekeepers and publishers continue to overlook…
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We Need Equal Books
While in one sense the propensity in mainstream discourse to describe racial conflict with words like “tolerance” and “hate”—rather than “power” or “oppression”—has made it possible for greater numbers of people to conceive of how racism affects individuals on a…