Friday, September 20, 2013

Weekend Reading: The Things I Might Have Missed Edition

One of the things I've been doing as part of my attempt to move further along my personal path towards understanding my racial privilege is consciously diversifying the things I read. One of the easiest ways I've found to do that has been to diversify my Twitter feed. Tonight, I want to share with you some of the things that I would have missed if I hadn't done that.

The first few links are a bit of a cheat, because I first followed @tressiemcphd because someone else in my Twitter stream kept retweeting really smart things she said about education and training and jobs. It turns out, she also writes really smart, interesting things about race. Here are two recent posts:

Her essay about Miley Cyrus and the way whites view the sexuality of black women was eye-opening. I have been subject to my share of harassment, but I have never been expected to be complicit in it in the way that she describes.

Her essay about the recent killing of Jonathan Ferrell and the requirement in our society for black men to "whistle Vivaldi" was devastating.

Just today, she retweeted a link to this piece from Brian Foster that I cannot do justice in describing, so will just send you over to read.

Moving to much lighter topics, I found this article about an awesome project to dub Star Wars in Diné (the language of the Navajo Nation) via @aurabogado.

Roxane Gay (@rgay) wrote several posts about literature from writers of color at The Nation. Two of my favorites are her interview with Kiese Laymon and her coverage of the #DiversityinSFF hashtag.  Roxane Gay also writes a Tumblr blog where, among other things, she writes amazing posts combining cooking and whatever issue is on her mind that day. She wrote a particularly moving post after Betsy Karasik's rape apology article in the Washington Post. She is a very talented writer, the type that makes you think you'd happily read a furniture assembly manual if she wrote it.

I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates for ages and have his Atlantic blog in my RSS feed not my Twitter stream, but I'll add this to the post anyway: this post about the state of the Black family  is great.

I'll continue to add more diverse voices to my Twitter stream. Suggestions of people to follow or blogs to read are welcome in the comments.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the great links, Cloud! I read racialicious as well, and sometimes when I need a laugh, yo is this racist? (a tumblr).

    ReplyDelete
  2. A black female artist who does not want her name associated with her blog.

    http://cauchycomplete.wordpress.com/

    That's a wise course for a black woman with a day job that's related to Cauchy's completeness theorem.

    You want to see her work related to Trayvon Martin.

    ReplyDelete
  3. EarthSciProf8:31 AM

    Thanks again for the excellent blog Cloud. As I mentioned on Twitter (@mooregeochem), I've been reading for a while and really enjoy your writing. I also enjoyed your e-book. Keep up the good work.

    I've found your reading and thinking on race to be thought provoking. Just read this article and thought it, and the books by the author interviewed, may be of interest.
    http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/the-town-where-the-men-are-all-marked/279806/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the recommendations everyone. I'll check them out. And welcome, EarthSciProf! I'm glad you like the blog (and I liked the article you sent me on Twitter).

    ReplyDelete
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