Citizens United
Nick Laird takes a long look at Claudia Rankine for the New York Review of Books: When we march under one banner for different causes, when we gather many different…
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Racism
497 posts
Repressed Reading
That night, I found myself seriously questioning this assumption I’d held since childhood: “You have to try to forget that while you’re reading.” You do? Why? And, more to the…
Hugos, Hijacked
What has happened is simple: an angry mob has exploited a loophole in how nominations occur in order to crash a party that they seemingly detest anyway. The gaming of…
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.
The Rumpus Interview with LaShonda Katrice Barnett
Novelist LaShonda Katrice Barnett discusses her debut novel, Jam on the Vine, how becoming a historian taught her about plot, Muslims living in Texas in the 19th century, and the Missouri State Penitentiary, also known as “the bloodiest 47 acres in America.”
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…
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)…
FBI Targeted Black Authors
Authors who worried the FBI might have been monitoring them were absolutely right, especially for Harlem Renaissance era authors. For more than half a century, the FBI kept tabs on black…
Outrage Laced With Vulnerability
When the grand juries failed to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo, they added to a lineage of injustices enacted against black people in America. Rumpus contributor Kaveh Akbar speaks…
Mirrors and Windows
Jacqueline Woodson responds to Daniel Handler’s racist watermelon joke at the National Book Awards with a moving and direct piece in the New York Times. She neither condemns nor forgives…
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…
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,…