whiteness
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A Heart-Centered Engagement: Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thompson-Spires illustrate[s] the psychic traps set when myths take precedence over lived experience, when “the monstrous head deforms the face.”
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No Pressure: Bieber, Blackness, the Cult of Perfection
Bieber is like a prism that reflects back whatever you want to see.
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Slush Piles in White
The sensibilities of whiteness do not want us to work, do not want us to think, do not want us to imagine outside of its bounds.
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In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
Jenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment.
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This Week in Essays
Minda Honey writes at Longreads on traveling to detox from whiteness and discovering there is nearly nowhere to escape. Good news, New Yorkers: apparently noise can be good for creativity. Susie Neilson looks at the good and the bad of noise pollution for Nautilus.
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Vincent Toro: Challenging Whiteness and Refusing to Be Colonized
Poet Vincent Toro on his debut collection, Stereo.Island.Mosaic, his writing process, and searching for identity.
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The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay discusses her new collection, Difficult Women, the problem with whiteness as the default and the need for diverse representation, and life as a workaholic.
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Podcatcher #5: #GoodMuslimBadMuslim
Podcatcher talks with Taz Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh of #GoodMuslimBadMuslim about the podcast format, finding humor in absurdity, and diversity within the Muslim identity.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Twenty-Three Pieces of the Sunset Bowl
[A]ll over town, pits in the ground stayed pits in the ground. Those cavities were my consolation. For the moment, we were all in the hole.
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White Noise
Over at Hazlitt, Morgan Jerkins unpacks our collective literary fascination with white suburban boredom, connecting the historical dots between these dry developments and the redlining that created them, while also highlighting the fact that the at root of boredom is…
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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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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…