Yellowface in Poetry
There’s a storm in the poetry world, this one set off by the bio in Best American Poetry 2015 of Michael Derrick Hudson, who has been publishing under the name Yi-Fen…
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Racism
497 posts
The Rumpus Review of [insert] boy by Danez Smith
In this sense, the book is a “coming-of-age” story and “spiritual quest” as much as a seething commentary on the catastrophe effected by the disease of contemporary racism and white supremacy.
You Are Not Like Other Children
You are not like the other children. You can’t get into the same juvenile mischief your white friends get into. You represent something more than yourself and your family when…
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Bill Cosby’s Faux Legacy
Bill Cosby was never the man, the icon, the protector and illustrator of black culture, the guide, the genius we have created in our minds.
A Classroom of Atticus F., G., and H.
It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature. Over at the Paris Review, Sadie Stein takes a look at the unfortunate facts: Atticus was kind of…
The Last Book I Loved: Home
I’ve been drawn to Morrison lately because I’ve been thinking about historical and social wakes as I’ve felt the swaying of the ones I’m in.
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…
What You See
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book Between the World and Me is a letter addressed to his son that America needs to read. New York profiles the author, whose fearless writing about…
Percival Everett, Begrudgingly
Everything is about identity. What is not? Over at VQR, Matthew Dischinger interviews Percival Everett, who expresses his views on the necessity of region and place in literature, good old-fashioned…
The Rumpus Interview with Jay Rubin
Author and translator Jay Rubin talks about his new novel, The Sun Gods, translating Haruki Murakami into English, and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
A New Tool Based On Old Racialism
While concerns over the accuracy and invasiveness of the technology are important, the primary fear I have is that the technology available today masks a form of gender and racial…
Claudia Rankine and #BlackLivesMatter
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite…