Tag Archives: African/African American Interest

Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: In Between

Greetings on this fine Friday! We have a couple links for you this week, dealing with interactions and being between cultures or peoples.

First, the Times has a look at Anglo-Indian culture: a relic of colonialist times, composed of people of (usually partly) European origins living in India, blending Indian and British cultures while being part of neither. Anglo-Indians occupied a middle position in the racial hierarchy of colonial India, seen as inferior to people of entirely English descent and upbringing, but superior to the native Indians.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Appearance

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Greetings on another Friday afternoon!

The New Cover
The Original Cover

Steph Su Reads starts us out with Why I Want More Asians on YA Book Covers: My Experience with Racism, in which she shares a personal experience with racism and her dismay over the revised cover of Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Changing and Expanding Communities

Some interesting essays round the blogosphere this week touching on all kinds of diversity—race and more!

Cynic’s blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates, and he has a really interesting look at the progression of ethnic groups through his neighborhood: first the Irish, then the Jews, now the African Americans. Each group starts as outsiders, whom the insiders swear never to accept, so they create their own institutions and maintain their culture but eventually assimilate, spread out and leave the enclave available for the next group of outsiders—and with the vibrant African American community there now, he wonders, what comes next for them?

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: There’s an app for that

Well, it’s HOT, and it seems like the urge to stay out of the heat has led to lots of thoughtful conversations around the web this week.

We begin with a new take on To Kill a Mockingbird, the classic by Harper Lee that celebrated its 50th Anniversary just this week. While it’s been taught for years as the quintessential anti-racism novel, Stuff White People Do has a fascinating argument for why the book can also be read as racist. Among the arguments: “The novel reduces black people to passive, humble victims, thereby ignoring the realities of black agency and resistance.” Even if you’ve got a deep love for To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s worth thinking about who it was written for, how it can be read differently by different readers, and how it fits into the larger picture of a literature curriculum heavily dominated by white authors.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: It’s a Jungle Out There

Racialicious starts us off this week with a thoughtful look at books about black southerners written by white authors, and street-lit written by black writers.

The Washington Monthly takes a look at some disturbing rhetoric that’s come up in the Elena Kagan hearings—not rhetoric about Kagan, but about Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

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General

Publishing Serendipity

It sometimes happens in publishing that more than one publisher releases a book about the same subject or person in the same season or soon after. This is occurring more and more, especially with biographies. Recently we published a picture book biography of Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist and environmentalist who initiated a tree planting movement in Kenya that resulted in the planting of 30 million trees. Our book was the fourth book about Maathai to be published for children in the past couple of years.Seeds of Change image

Why does this happen? Serendipity? Coincidence? Stars lining up in a certain alignment? Publishers in general are on constant lookout for inspirational stories. At the same time, authors are writing about people who inspire them, and experienced authors are doing their homework, searching for stories that are absent in the marketplace in an effort to present something new to readers. It is entirely possible that four different authors, around the same time, came to the same conclusion that there were no books on Wangari Maathai for children and decided to do something about it. This is where overlap can occur.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Heat Wave

Most of the country looks poised for a hot weekend, so here are some pieces to read while you lurk in the air-conditioned splendor of indoors.

Hampton Stevens, guest blogging for Ta-Nahisi Coates, shares a story of a child trying to puzzle our increasingly globalized world, courtesy of the FIFA World Cup, and points to the communication issues inherent in terms like “African American.”

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Oil, Russia, and Avenue Q

The oil spill in the Gulf has been all over the news lately, and, frustrating though the lack of progress has been, there have been many efforts to stem the oil geyser. What about oil spills that don’t have a large impact on Americans? The Times looks at the Niger River Delta, which has seen the equivalent of the Exxon-Valdez spill a year every year for fifty years, with little attempt at cleanup or attention to the disastrous effect on the area’s ecosystem or economic future.

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