race
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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.
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Why We Need Claudia Rankine
There’s the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we’ve evolved. We want to erase the nightmarish truth that at one time, we were the kind of people who would inflict unspeakable cruelties to…
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Novelist Brings Slavery to California
In an interview with NPR, novelist and funnyman Paul Beatty discusses his novel The Sellout, and what’s on his mind when creating a world where plantation culture is reborn in California. The novel focuses on Bonbon, an African American man…
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Joan Didion on White People
Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Falling For The Femme Fatale
If power is going to shift toward equality, men have to see power less as an inherent right and more as something we can be incentivized to relinquish.
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Eric 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…
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Diversity Matters
Daniel Handler’s (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) recent racist joke at the National Book Awards exposed an uncomfortable truth about the American publishing industry: its overwhelming whiteness. For the industry to survive, it must embrace diversity. Over at the Guardian, Carole DeSanti…
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Ferguson: 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…
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Sylvia Plath and Race
Why Plath? People are surprised or disappointed or embarrassed when I automatically cite her as one of my writing influences, one of my life influences. I think it’s because of the stigma of suicide and ingrained bias. She’s a polarizing…
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Writing the Third Rail
My teacher’s point was, “Don’t write about race. It’s not worth it. It’s the third rail.” Over at Guernica, Grace Bello interviews Jess Row about his new book, Your Face In Mine, writing about race as a white man, identity, and…
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Paradise Locked
In anticipation of this past week’s Hay Festival, fiction luminary Toni Morrison wrote an essay for The Telegraph examining the concept of paradise as it relates to race and class. The novelist locates the promise of this “Utopia for few”…
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Teaching How to Read Racial Identity
Last week, we wrote about Junot Diaz‘s thoughts on the silence around racial identity that he experienced during his MFA in the ‘90s. Salon tracked down the syllabi of two undergrad courses the writer teaches at MIT, in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Department. Informed…