Sep 30, 2019
Publishing has a race problem. Entertainment Weekly reported that only 7.8% of romance authors using a traditional publisher were people of color in 2016. For that same year, NPR found that only 22% of all characters in children’s books were characters of color.
This, in a country where people of color are expected to...
Sep 28, 2019
In 2017, editors Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, along with co-editor Cathy Schlund-Vials, published a volume of essays entitled The Beiging of America: Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. This collection joins others such as Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time and A Race Anthology, edited by Dan Moulthrop and...
Sep 24, 2019
How can memoir be a political act? When living under oppressive systems, the simple act of standing up and sharing personal stories that go against the mainstream is a political act. Mireya S. Vela and Julián Esteban Torres López meditate on this issue, which is an essential part of each other’s work. Vela speaks...
Sep 12, 2019
Much of the already small disability representation in the media focuses on white people, and often men. This includes Artie Abrams from the TV show Glee, Jack Hodgins from the TV show Bones, and Jake Sully from the film Avatar. Although we would never know it from TV and movies, the CDC reports that 19.67% of people of...
Sep 12, 2019
Since European settlers brought enslaved Africans to the United States, there has been passing. In terms of race, passing means presenting as a race you don’t identify as, such as when an escaped enslaved person pretended to be white to avoid being sold back into slavery. More recently, former Spokane NAACP president