During the 1960s and 70s, legendary jazz drummer Art Taylor interviewed his fellow musicians. The interviews are collected in the 1993 book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, and it’s one of jazz’s greatest. The familial, casual conversations are also serious and insightful, full of history, portraiture, and revelations about race relations in America, and the […]
RG: Discussions about race, particularly in mixed company, are often combative and contentious. How the hell do we talk about race? TC: No idea. I just try to communicate with as much honesty and respect as possible. I think we should not forget that a not so insufficient portion of this country sees it as […]
What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter […]
Asking how am I going to cover Black Twitter is like asking how I’m going to cover American culture. I’m never going to get all of it, but I’m going to pull what I find interesting. —Dexter Thomas, as interviewed by Chava Gourarie in the Columbia Journalism Review. Earlier this week the Los Angeles Times hired Dexter […]
In 1968, essayist, novelist and activist James Baldwin spoke with Esquire about racism in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, poverty and police brutality. In our current era of high profile police violence in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, and protests in Baltimore, Maryland, Baldwin’s words sound as prescient and, unfortunately, fresh as they did forty-seven years […]
A young man concerned that the police will take him into custody comes to see danger and risk in the mundane doings of everyday life. To survive outside prison, he learns to hesitate when others walk casually forward, to see what others fail to notice, to fear what others trust or take for granted.
Put another way, the supposition on which our mass incarceration is premised—namely, that it materially reduces crime—is, at best, a hunch. Yet the price we pay for acting on this hunch is enormous. This is true in the literal sense: it costs more than $80 billion a year to run our jails and prisons. It […]
As I described in the Making of Ferguson, the federal government maintained a policy of segregation in public housing nationwide for decades. This was as true in northeastern cities like New York as it was in border cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. In 1994, civil rights groups sued the Department of Housing and Urban […]
Chris Offutt writes in Oxford American
on the concept of “white trash,” the seemingly immutable class boundaries that divide us, and food’s power to widen the chasm or bridge the gap.He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper […]
“I never did like the world-famous Mardi Gras that went on in New Orleans. It was a beautiful sight, but to me it was horrible. I have seen so many people hurt on that particular day . . . The white people would celebrate their Mardi Gras with big and expensive floats that went down the main part of Canal Street, which were very beautiful and high class . . . But for my people, for them it would be such a tragedy. “
Here’s a powerful story from Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah, about race and growing up in Oklahoma. Askew spoke during our night of storytelling with This Land Press in New York City. The full talk is below, and you can see all our storytellers at our YouTube page:
In January The Washington Post published a powerful three-part series looking at the plight of the black middle class in America. The series focuses on Maryland’s Prince George’s County—the most affluent majority-black county in America, as well as one of the counties hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis. At the heart of the series is a singular, vexing question: “Why don’t […]
We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun. Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the […]
Over the next three decades, Hank Sanders became a fixture in the statehouse, ascending to the chairmanship of the Senate’s Finance and Taxation Education Committee. From his expansive office just off the Senate floor, he controlled Alabama’s Education Trust Fund, the largest operating budget in state government. Sanders tried to exercise his power to represent […]
We must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken […]
This brief list is but a glimpse of the complex, crucial and ongoing discussion about the importance of inclusivity and the problems with privilege in the literary canon. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, books you wish the canon could accept, etc. 1. “On ‘The John Green Effect,’ Contemporary Realism, and […]
As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your […]
“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and […]
Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. In light of the recent Zimmerman trials, I’d like to share these four pieces. I’ve thought a lot about this blog post by Mary, who writes, “Another thing I’ve noticed is that people are more concerned with being the best ally than they […]
In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context: Thus the myth of ‘twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American […]
A memoir of “growing up black, on parole, in Mississippi”: I enroll at Jackson State University in the Spring semester, where my mother teaches Political Science. Even though, I’m not really living at home, everyday Mama and I fight over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me […]
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