A Q&A with Russell Cobb | The natural resource curse is what happens when a given society strikes it rich by extracting some resource and chases after that wealth as other parts of the economy decline. The race to make as much money as possible leads to corruption, inequality, violence, and environmental destruction. Economists and political scientists point to places like Nigeria, Russia, and Venezuela as object lessons in the natural resource curse, but many of those social ills also plague places like Oklahoma and Texas. Read more →
633 posts categorized "Race and Ethnicity in America"
By Christian Coleman | A Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month unmarred by election-year drama would have been a miracle. No such luck in 2024. Not with anti-immigrant rhetoric regrowing its Hydra’s head when right-wing candidates take to the debate and rally stages. If that weren’t enough, Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month started off with news that Jeanine Cummins will release new novel next year about the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | And the category is . . . Challenged! Challenged as in a hair’s breadth away from being banned. For Banned Books Week, United Against Book Bans released the latest roundup of challenged books, and ten Beacon Press titles are on it! Tens across the board for each one strutting their red-alert stuff! Some are par for the rabid far-right course—Race and history and queers! Oh, my!—while others, indeed, will make you do a double take. Read more →
By Remica Bingham-Risher | I met [Sonia] Sanchez at the second Furious Flower Conference in 2004, where she performed with her band Full Moon of Sonia, and interviewed her a few years later. As we had just begun to get to know each other and I was a young mostly unpublished poet, I was surprised to be invited to a gathering at her house that first evening we sat together. At Sanchez’s party, there was food spread from end to end on a large wooden table; people filled the house and were almost as interesting and varied as the art stationed in every room. Read more →
By Samira K. Mehta | Since Kamala Harris has become the Democratic candidate for president, her multiracial identity has returned to the news. Harris is the child of a Black Jamaican father and a South Asian mother. You can read that heritage as multiracial, as we are increasingly inclined to do now, but for most of American history, Harris would have been read more or less exclusively as Black. Vice-President Harris has explained that her mother knew this aspect of American race relations, and so she understood that Kamala and her sister Maya would be seen as Black girls and then as Black women. She is a Black woman, a graduate of Howard University. That said, she is Black with South Asian heritage, a multiracial presidential candidate in an increasingly multiracial world. Read more →
By Kyle T. Mays | Since the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, reparations have become a greater part of the national consciousness and discourse. Municipalities across the US implemented some form of reparations programs; two states, including California and New York, have implemented task forces to study the possibility of it. There is no consensus on reparations and cash payments, though. The recent discussions and debates on reparations for Black Americans remain controversial across racial and party lines. Read more →
By Dara Baldwin | This June 22, we celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the historic civil rights Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) case Olmstead v. Lois Curtis. In 1999, SCOTUS “upheld the unjustified segregation of people with disabilities.” Many people are unaware of this significant civil rights case and its significance to the lives of disabled people. But even more egregious is the erasure from history of its lead plaintiff: a Black disabled woman. Read more →
By Remica Bingham-Risher | When I asked Forrest Hamer to autograph his books, I had never seen anyone so upset about such a small mistake. We were at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop where he was teaching and, like all the other students there, I became enamored with his work and unassuming nature, wanting nothing more than to spend the last few nights surveying his words. As he signed his books, he misspelled my name, and when I crossed out one letter for another, he apologized to no end. He held me there, despite the line forming behind us, repeating, “I’m so, so sorry about that. Names are important. Please let me take care of things.” Read more →
By Christian Coleman | This Sunday, it’s dad’s turn to be given his flowers—or tie or power tool or gift card. You get the idea. Our flowers come in the form of books, some of which are written by fathers. Books for the daddies and zaddies on their muscle-bound journey. For the House fathers taking the rejected queer kids under their wing. For the feminist dads who don’t want to go the way of the Kens in “Barbie.” For the fathers living from hustle to hustle to keep a roof over their loved ones’ heads. Read more →
By Leigh Patel | Mainstream media’s coverage of the campus-based student protests and encampments across the globe primarily addresses the ‘need’ to use law enforcement, including university police and politicians’ calls for National Guard. Armed with riot gear which does not include mace, batons, firearms, or metal or rubber tie handcuffs, this armament has been firmly in place long before this student mobilization. Through phones and social media, the world watches as students’ encampments are forcibly assaulted and police officers, municipal and university, use blunt force to remove students and faculty from these sites of protests. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | “How do you teach a kindergartener about the histories and contemporary legacies of race and racism in a way that affirms her humanity and agency?” Dr. OiYan Poon poses herself this question in the introduction of “Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family” after her three-year-old daughter Té Té broaches the topic of race. An answer to her question could be found by turning to this year’s theme for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Read more →
A Q&A with Dr. OiYan Poon | I have been trying to write a book on Asian Americans and affirmative action since at least 2012. Each time I started, I couldn’t figure out who my intended audience was. As a result, my writing process kept stalling out. I was accustomed to writing for scholarly and technical audiences but had a hard time explaining things to wider audiences—people who are intelligent, curious, and civically engaged. Like many toddlers, my daughter started to ask a lot of questions when she became verbal. Read more →
By Howard Bryant | Americans have shown they can only discuss race within two frameworks: Things are better than they were or Get over it. So what exactly happened to the Heritage in the 1970s that began a nearly half-century slide into dormancy, when protest was transformed from noble to toxic? O. J. Simpson happened to it. Read more →
By Alana Lopez | One of the first ideas taught in my Literature of the Harlem Renaissance course last semester at Boston University was the concept of Harlem as a haven. In Claude McKay’s “Home to Harlem,” it was, as its name suggests, a motivating factor for its main character, like that of Ithaca for Odysseus. It was a hub of inventive and unorthodox expressions of self as shown by Louis Armstrong’s jazz or Gladys Bentley’s blues. For Rudolph Fisher, Harlem’s culture is familiar and, though often written off as a fad, rich with history and ultimately timeless in “The Caucasian Storms Harlem.” To James Baldwin, it is home and birthplace as well and, much like him, I’ve come to find that “home” and “haven” are vastly different things. Read more →
By Mei Su Bailey | This year, Beacon Press is taking part in the nationwide celebration of James Baldwin’s hundredth birthday with the release of the James Baldwin Centennial Series! Originally published in “Notes of a Native Son,” these essay collections commemorate Baldwin’s legacy as an artist, an activist, a social critic, and a gifted writer. Read more →
A Q&A with Jaclyn Moyer | I wasn’t intending to write about the history of the organic farming movement when I started this project, but as I began to uncover my family’s past, I discovered that the origins of the organic movement, the development of modern wheat, and my own personal history intersected. And all three were bound up with colonialism. Read more →
By Shenequa Golding | I get why so many Black women are divorcing themselves from the “strong Black woman” trope. The world measures our strength by how much deliberate mistreatment and neglect we accept. We’re expected to pour ourselves into others so much that it’s positioned as an “honor” to die empty. Black women deserve so much more than to live as everyone else's mule and then go to our graves depleted. Read more →
By Lauren Michele Jackson | The art world, according to itself, does not have a race problem. The art world does not allow itself to have a race problem. Were any one entity within the network of museums, galleries, shows, curators, schools, artists, press, and millions upon hundreds of millions of dollars that make up capital A Art to allow for race as a topic of debate, the whole enterprise might collapse into so much dust. For the art world to admit it has a race problem, it would have to account for its centuries-long history in which peoples of color have been regularly pushed from the frame of what constitutes artistic enterprise; meanwhile, their creations have long inspired European and white American artists who deviate from the norm. Read more →
A Q&A with Yashica Dutt | The research process for the book was fairly typical. I spent a ton of time in libraries and archives, extracting material around the historical details that have gone into shaping this book. I was most surprised to learn how different those details were from the narrative of history that we have been given for decades. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Remember when Janelle Monáe said Black women aren’t a monolith? Same goes for the Black diaspora, and yet the Grammys love plugging their ears and going La la la la laaaaa. This year, they did Black artists dirty yet again, snubbing them in the award for Album of the Year. Jay-Z is far from the first to call out their snubbery at the ceremony. They’ve also been called out for confining Black artist nominations in the rap/hip hop and R&B categories. Read more →