racism

Cord Jefferson wants to tell a quick story. It involves something that happened to a friend of his, although the writer-director of American Fiction is quick to point out that the incident in question could have easily happened to any number of Black creatives he knows, or for that matter, himself. This friend was an aspiring screenwriter who took a meeting with studio executives. They asked her what she was interested in doing. I want to write a rom-com, she answered. Maybe an erotic thriller. Great, they said. Love…

December 20, 20235min readToday’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlookBy Charles Stross Science fiction (SF) influences everything in this day and age, from the design of everyday artifacts to how we—including the current crop of 50-something Silicon Valley billionaires—work. And that’s a bad thing: it leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for…

December 18, 20234min readUniversities need to train their faculty to be better mentors to students of color, and to understand these students’ vulnerabilitiesBy Nia Burrell When I started the physics Ph.D. program I was so excited about, I realized I was one of the few Black graduate students in the department and the only Black woman. I wasn’t surprised. I already knew Black women made up less than 1 percent of the physics doctorates in the U.S., but nevertheless, I soon started feeling isolated.These feelings became…

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison has hit his breaking point. The students in his Southern-lit class at the prestigious university he teaches at are oversensitive snowflakes. His superiors think he needs a break from academia. Monk’s novels may still be in print, but you wouldn’t know it; they’ve all been relegated to the bottom shelf of the “African-American Studies” section of chain bookstores, simply because he’s a Black author. (“The Blackest thing about these books are the ink!” he yells.) An illness and a tragedy send…

In Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, mysterious foreigners mingle, sometimes simply exist, in Rome. Selfies on the Spanish Steps in Rome. (Chabe01 / Wikimedia Commons) They are professors, spouses, temporary workers, tourists, refugees, children of immigrants... people from different parts of the world, all negotiating their foreignness, sometimes around pretty ordinary circumstances like a simple meal, other times facing racist attacks or hostility. Stay tuned with breaking news…

I was in fourth grade when I got my hair relaxed for the first time. My mom took me to a professional salon, and Game Boy in hand, I sat in the chair, nervous but excited. My mom and sometimes other relatives had always braided my hair at home, and now, at age nine, I wanted straight hair. The hairdresser took out my long braids, washed my hair, and then applied a thick white cream that looked like my dad’s shaving cream.Within seconds, it began to burn, a lot. I clenched my teeth, bearing the searing pain in my scalp…

December 7, 20236 min readFar-right extremists shifted their online hate from Muslims to Jews in 2017, and offline hate followed the same trends By Will Hobbs & Nazita Lajevardi Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in the U.S. Just two weeks after the start of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, hate incidents grew by 400 percent against Jews, and increased by 216 percent over a four-week period against Muslims, compared to the previous year.Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate is surging most…

Hidden away in the garden of Gipsy House in Buckinghamshire was a cosy little shed where Roald Dahl penned some of his most phizz-whizzing stories. For Dahl, as for any writer, his daily workspace was a sacred place of creative incubation, a safe refuge from the external world that allowed him to be alone with his many internal ones. This consecrated writing shed and all the elements that were slaves to Dahl’s imagination are recreated to forensic perfection by Wes Anderson in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the…

Data shows that Black people continue to be incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate across Canada. Credit: Statistics Canada Black people continue to be overrepresented at all levels of the Canadian justice system. According to the Correctional Service of Canada, 9% of offenders in custody were Black in 2020–2021, despite only representing about 4% of Canada's population. …

In the spring of 2022, Ibram X. Kendi was recognized as one of the most banned authors in America. The National Book Award winner’s passionate reporting on the permeation of racist ideas throughout American history riled up conservative proponents, leading to three of Kendi’s tomes being banned in six school districts across multiple states. Now, his efforts to expose racist ideology is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, Stamped From the Beginning.  Stamped From the Beginning, based on Kendi’s 2016 book of…