“During the day, MDP Circle is a dreamy little slice of what could be without the tyrannical hand of the state. At night, the police gas and shoot anyone gathered there. The oscillation between joy and terror is exhausting.”

“You may not have the power to fire a bad cop, but you must make it clear to your unprofessional peers that racism and abuse of power are not tolerated. They make your job more difficult and they endanger your safety every day.”

A powerful essay by Sarah Bellamy, who, in the wake of George Floyd being murdered in her hometown, argues that we need to question how white bodies might be predisposed to rely on a racial inheritance that endangers the lives of others.      

“We know the compounding effect brought by feelings of isolation on one’s spirit as the ‘only’ in a meeting, within a boardroom, on a committee, in a research lab, or in a classroom.”

For over 20 years Robin DiAngelo has been a consultant, educator and facilitator on issues of racial and social justice. She is the author of several books, including White Fragility. 

Journalists frequently write about the working class, but is anyone writing for them? Because “[e]conomic hardship does not mean the absence of joy, love, pleasure, duty, care,” and stories — and representation! — are powerful.

In an interview at Literary Hub, Toni Morrison says she wasn’t interested in writing at an early age. “No, I didn’t think about writing until I was 39. I read all the time. I could read when I was three years old and that’s what I did. At some point, I realized that there was […]

In Barb magazine, founder Marcelle Karp has a wide-ranging conversation with author and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom, on the South, black feminism, being a little petty, and much more.

Indigenous grad school student Erica Violet Lee meditates on wealth and abundance: “I want wealth by our definitions, because their definitions will always label us needy, at-risk, poor. I want abundance, in all the ways we define it for ourselves.”

“When a marginalized person claims language to describe their oppressed identity, they are speaking themself into existence in a society that is trying to annihilate them.”

David Chang’s Ugly Delicious explores some nuanced ideas around race and food while also reproducing some harmful cultural narratives. Media culture Ph.D. student Rachel Kuo identifies five ways she’d like the show to push further.

This is what privilege looks like: “Because of that small step up, everything else was given to us. The guarantee of rest, of proper food, of an exuberance of attention that continues at the hotel we are staying at. We were given more because we had more to begin with.”

Joséphine Mwanvua on the difficulty of asking for help as a person of color: “Here, in the West, black communities and other POC communities still carry a taboo around mental health issues.”

Scott Woods at Scott Woods Makes Lists compiles a sequel to his popular 2016 list of black picture books that aren’t about boycotts, buses, and basketball.

Phenderson Djèlí Clark on getting political in sci-fi/fantasy: “It informs my writing. It informs my characters. It informs my imagination. It informs my very reason for creating. I guess I’ve always known I was a political writer of SFF. Because there are no ‘non-sci-fi/fantasy issues.’”