In a Letter of Recommendation for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham spoke of her experiences getting best friend tattoos: “I don’t regret any of the ink. When I look at it, I smile and think about the feverish throes of friend-love and how lucky I was to have felt it more than once.”
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In Elle, Melissa Harris-Perry “sent out a call of [her] own to writers and thinkers who center black women and girls in their work.” She says: “It is no secret that I am a platinum member of the Beyhive….But this is not just another music video. It is not just another Beyoncé video. Something different happened here, didn’t it?” The responses to MHP’s call are brilliant.
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Artist Alyssa Boni has been doing the Lord’s work for Elle UK, photoshopping men out of photos of politicians to prove what should be an obvious point: we need #MoreWomen in politics. For example:
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Molly McArdle spoke to fifty people across the industry about diversity in publishing, and the results are in Brooklyn magazine. From Tony Tulathimutte: “You will be tokenized. Even when you get to write about your own experience of being a minority in America—you know, even that can be turned against you. Are you going to be used later on as leverage against an accusation of racism? Will you then be seen as a collaborator? In most cases the answer is yes.”
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Alexis Clements wrote an essay for Hyperallergic about her experience attending the Poetry Project’s live event, “White Room,” a conversation dealing with how to dismantle white supremacy among American poets. Among many other observations, she notes: “People have been walking away from and refusing the white room, the male room, the straight room, the able-bodied room, all the rooms, for a long time. Alternative spaces and radical political movements did not get “killed” in this country. Narratives of failure around radical politics often look at too short a time span, too little of a sweep of history.”
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Maria Qamar, a Desi artist based in Canada, gave an interview for Dazed about her process, cultural appropriation, and much more: “It is really funny, because the whole point of this pop-art Indian thing was so that I could take the most American – the most western thing – I could find, which were American romance comics or novels. I wanted to take the most iconic thing, which is the soap opera, and blend them together. Right now it feels like I’m taking their shit and throwing it back at them, saying, ‘Here it is, you made this. This is all you.’”
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Claire Vaye Watkins wrote a powerful meditation on pandering, privilege, and the patriarchy for Tin House: “If you like my book I’m grateful. But I remind you that people at the periphery will travel to accept and even love things not made for or toward them: we have been trained to do so our entire lives. I’m not trying to talk anyone out of their readerly response, only to confess to what went on in my mind when I made the book, to assemble an honest inventory of people I have not been writing toward (though I thought I was): women, young women, people of color, the rural poor, the American West, my dead mother.”
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Brittney Cooper writes for Salon about the “mundane terror” of the school-to-prison pipeline in America: “What struck me and many others with whom I spoke on social media, was the quiet resolve of the young girl who was attacked, as she saw the officer escalating…. It is almost as if she knew his brutality was coming, almost as if she were steeling herself for the blow, almost as if she was no stranger to having somebody with power put his hands on her, almost as if she were sure that no one would stand up to protect her. If those were her calculations, she was right on every count.”
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Check out Purvi Shah’s work for VIDA on the unbearable white maleness of poetry and the economy of Best American Poetry: “…[I]t is shocking to put these two facts together: 1) in his language, Hudson used an Asian American woman’s name to place his poems; 2) there has been only 1 identifiable woman of color editor and 0 Asian American editors of the Best American Poetry series. It is abysmal when poetry, which could be the most democratic of art forms, is reinforced as the locus of the privileged White male.”
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Claudia Rankine profiled tennis star Serena Williams for the New York Times: “For black people, there is an unspoken script that demands the humble absorption of racist assaults, no matter the scale, because whites need to believe that it’s no big deal. But Serena refuses to keep to that script…. She shows us her joy, her humor and, yes, her rage. She gives us the whole range of what it is to be human, and there are those who can’t bear it, who can’t tolerate the humanity of an ordinary extraordinary person.”
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