race
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The Post-Ferguson Classroom
Here is the thing: silence does not protect us; in fact it suffocates us. Marcia Chatelain, professor, author, and originator of #thefergusonsyllabus, discusses the importance of talking about race in high school and college classrooms in Lenny Letter.
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The Rumpus Interview with Leland Cheuk
Leland Cheuk discusses his novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, dark humor, cancer, morally corrupt characters, and his mother.
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The Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life.
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Sociology and Art with W. E. B. DuBois
Allison Meier writes for Hyperallergic on the hand-drawn, recently digitized data visualizations produced by W. E. B. DuBois (in collaboration with others) to demonstrate the size and scope of black life in America at the turn of the 20th century.…
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What the Cameras Show Us: Ourselves
When I decided I needed to write this piece, I spent a lot of time wondering whether I could. Whether I should.
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Breaking the Script
There’s a tendency to take writers who write about race and shuffle them into a genre, into a predetermined conversation, whether they wanted to be there or not. But even if the constraints of the game are rigged, what Jenny…
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Unstuck in Time
Despite its uncanny salience in the context of this most recent wave of social injustice and protest, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was written well before the #BlackLivesMatter movement began. Far from a coincidence, the book’s resonance is a product of…
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Not Even Rumi is Safe from Hollywood Whitewashing
One of the world’s most read and beloved poets since the 13th century, and an immensely important artistic, academic, and spiritual figure in the Muslim community, is getting his own movie. So who is going to take on the leading…
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The Sound of White Flight
Over at Catapult, Kashana Cauley explores the origins of the Midwestern accent and discovers its roots in racial segregation: Apparently it wasn’t enough for GLVS [Great Lakes Vowel Shift] speakers to move very far away from minorities in order to…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.
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When White Saviors Create Literary Journals
Hey! We’re white! And we all voted for Obama! Twice! We should do something to help the literary downtrodden. American literature is already frustrating enough with publishing sorely lacking in diversity. But things can be even worse when the white-dominated industry…
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The Limits of Horror
At SF Signal, Victor LaValle discusses his horror novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, and writers using the constraints/limitations of genre to their advantage. Want more? Check out our own recent interview with LaValle here.