Twelve years ago, my grandmother passed away at the age of 94. Born in 1912, she was the product of a different time, but other than maybe telling a slightly off-color joke or wondering out loud why there were so many more homosexuals around these days than when she was young, I don’t recall her being prejudiced against any particular group (except maybe Italians, but that’s a story for another day). Apparently in her final days in the nursing home, however, she started loudly proclaiming […]
Life Doesn’t Make Narrative Sense
I cannot review the Little House books without talking about this: these books are racist. I hope that teachers or parents who are introducing these books to children for the first time are having serious discussions with these kids about racism and colonialism, and how these attitudes influenced westward expansion. As I was rereading these books (which, by the way, I loved as a kid and reread many times), I couldn’t stop thinking about the word “pioneer,” which in this case is just a euphemism […]
Practical Advice That We Need Now
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Best for: Everyone interested in combating white supremacy. In a nutshell: Author Ijeoma Oluo offers practical advice for ways to engage in conversations — and actions — to combat systemic racism. Worth quoting: SO MUCH. But some of my favorites include: “White Supremacy is this nation’s oldest pyramid scheme. Even those how have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out.” “I think about every black and brown person, every queer person, every disabled person, who […]
Hating, after all, was just a drier form of drowning
The Woman Next Door concerns two elderly women, neighbors and antagonists for the past twenty years or so, since shortly after the abolition of Apartheid, in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. One is black, the other white. Circumstance forces them to turn to each other for help. I picked this book up in Cape Town last fall, wanting to buy at least a few books by South African authors I hadn’t heard of. I thought I knew where this story was headed. Old white […]
Black girl poetic magic
Electric Arches is collection of poetry by Eve L. Ewing. Her poems muse on the black experience. She reveals painful moments of racism she encounters and add in handwritten font her imagined replies to the N-word. She writes odes to her musical heroes in “Appletree [on black womanhood, from and to Erykah Badu] and “On Prince”. Each poem describes how their music touched her soul. She uplifts the ordinary with her words adding a fantastical gloss of wonder. “so in this world, grease is a compliment, no […]
I wish my younger self could have read this book.
First and foremost, I love, maybe even adore, Coates writing. He manages to weave narrative with fact and emotion with such grace and power. If I could write like anyone, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I can’t write like Coates. Even if we wrote with the exact same words, I could not write like him because I am not him. For a long time, especially as a younger man, I believed that if I wanted to do something, it could be done and that […]
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