race
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The Rumpus Review of 12 Years A Slave
In 12 Years a Slave, a period piece transforms into drama without distance and intellectual arguments about slavery’s connection to the present.
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Queer Characters of Color in YA Novels
As a queer woman of color who writes young-adult fiction, Malinda Lo “was a little bit taken aback by the sheer paucity of books I could find about queer characters of color.” If you, too, have been seeking those sorts…
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On Realizing You’re Not White
The paint was several layers thick, each new message or drawing layered on a chaotic background of the preceding scrawl….“It’s the chink hate wall,” he said. Kevin did not consider my Chinese ethnicity when he said this. For Maisonneuve, Kimberley Fu…
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A Wild Excerpt from White Girls
Guernica has a lengthy excerpt up from White Girls, the genre-warping new collection of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and who knows what else by the New Yorker‘s Hilton Als. It’s complex, challenging, and completely, enthrallingly beautiful, so it’s impossible to choose…
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“What the Hell Is A ‘Writer of Color,’ Anyway?”
As part of her latest push to get the literary community talking seriously about diversity, our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has a piece up at the Nation about some of the thrilling, confounding, challenging books by writers of color out right…
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How Racism Hurts White Writers
The fight against inequality, the fight against The Default, is a fight for white spiritual and emotional freedom, not just the freedom of people of color, women, or gays and lesbians. In a diffuse but thought-provoking essay at Salon, Kartina Richardson…
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White Girls and Cultural Appropriation
White people clamoring to up their cred by appropriating nonwhite culture do so hoping to be rewarded for choices that are falsely seen as inherent in people of color. In an essay on cultural appropriation for the New Inquiry, Ayesha…
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The Atlas
I wanted to be a part of New Orleans. For months, I thought that meant drinking, eating, buying, taking pictures.
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Don’t You Know White Folks Don’t Care If You Die?
In what ways are we responsible to each other, and what happens when we don’t accept that responsibility? What happens when we do not recognize each other as being worthy? This Gawker essay may be called “The Worst of White…
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“You’re Not Surprised, Are You?”
“Imagine a life in which you think of other people’s safety and comfort first, before your own. You’re programmed and taught that from the gate. It’s like the opposite of entitlement.” In light of George Zimmerman’s recent acquittal, drummer and…
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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Brilliant Take on the Zimmerman Verdict
Not to overload anyone on political coverage, but Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reaction to the George Zimmerman trial is an absolute must-read. In it, he looks at the actual legal text involved in the case and points out that what’s so deeply frightening…
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Playing By the Rules: White Privilege and Rachel Jeantel
Clue: Post-Racial Edition. It was the black kid in the hoodie, with his cell phone, and “hostile” girlfriend.