Tag Archives: diversity

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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New Voices/New Visions Award

New Voices Award FAQs

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Note: The New Voices and New Visions writing contests are currently on a temporary hiatus. A follow-up announcement will come in 2024.

The New Voices Award is open to all authors of color and Native nations who have not previously had a children’s picture book published. The winner receives a cash prize of $2000 and our standard publication contract, including our basic advance and royalties for a first-time author. An Honor winner will receive a cash prize of $1000.

We periodically get some questions about the Award, so I’d like to answer a few of them if I can:

What does it mean to be a person of color?

Well, that can be a pretty complicated question, but for purposes of our New Voices Award specifically, we accept contest entries from people who self-identify as African, Asian/Pacific Islander, Latinx, Middle Eastern, or Native American/Indigenous descent.

Why is the New Voices Award only open to people of color?

The New Voices Award was founded to encourage and support authors of color in a market where they’ve been traditionally excluded and underrepresented. That was true in 2000 when the award was started and it’s still true today (see these stats for some surprising figures about the number of books published by/for people of color). The New Voices Award is one of the ways in which we’re trying to close the gap.

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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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General

More Diverse than You Thought?

Maybe you’ve seen this before. Maybe you haven’t. But, if we were to shrink the population of the world to 100 people while still maintaining the ratios of today, this is what our little village would look like:

61 Asians

12 Europeans

5 US Americans and Canadians

8 Latin Americans

14 Africans

51 would be male, 49 would be female

82 would be non-white; 18 white

67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian

80 would live in substandard housing

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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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General

Video Thursday: Racism vs. Wit

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This video is from Australia. Videos from abroad give Americans an international perspective on race relations. I always enjoy videos or statements that confront racism with humor and wit. Sure, overt racism is disturbing, but if one is able to collect oneself, avoid the knee-jerk reaction, and calmly and reasonably respond, I feel more wars would be averted and peace would prevail. Besides, it is no small feat to turn an ugly situation into one where we can actually laugh (Warning: Contains adult language).

General

Putting the “All” in “All-Stars”

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A guest post by our fantastic intern, Noemi:

Those of you Yankee fans out there have probably heard by now that Bob Sheppard, the long-time Yankee Stadium announcer, died From Louis Sockalexisyesterday at age 99. Among the heartwarming anecdotes and quips mentioned in his obituary and numerous articles memorializing the legend was a small detail that stood out to me which indicates the changing cultural backgrounds of baseball players from Sheppard’s start in 1951 through today.

In a tribute to him in the New York Times, George Vecsey wrote of Sheppard, “In an earlier time, when baseball was not yet comfortable with Latino players, he made sure to give Minnie Miñoso his tilde. Later, he delighted in getting the pronunciation right for Shigetoshi Hasegawa.”

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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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General

Video Thursday: The Lost Tribes of NYC

A loving ode to the diversity of voices heard in New York City every day:

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