Category: Articles

  • A Black Female Astrophysicist Explains Why Hidden Figures Isn’t Just About History Gizmodo 2017-01-17 Rae Paoletta Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures. Image: 20th Century Fox/YouTube First, it beat Star Wars: Rogue One. Now, for the second weekend since its wide-release debut, Hidden Figures—the true story of three black female mathematicians at NASA—is number…

  • 98-Year-Old NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson: ‘If You Like What You’re Doing, You Will Do Well’ People 2016-11-04 Caitlin Keating Katherine Johnson thinks all of her accomplishments over the 98 years she’s been alive are “ordinary.” But to the rest of the world, they’re anything but. Johnson, a physicist, space scientist and mathematician graduated from high school…

  • President with a torpedo in his crotch: how the works of Lubaina Himid speak to Trump times The Guardian 2017-01-17 Hettie Judah Lubaina Himid among the cutouts of slaves that form her 2004 piece Naming the Money, at Spike Island contemporary art centre in Bristol. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian Born in Zanzibar and…

  • Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time Virginia Quarterly Review Volume 93, Number 1, Winter 2017 pages 196-199 Kaitlyn Greenidge Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont Swing Time By Zadie Smith, Penguin, 2016, 464p. HB, $27. Midway through Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, the unnamed narrator watches two girls walk…

  • All of which makes Michael Tisserand’s “Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White” a fascinating and frustrating biography. Though Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip was admired in his lifetime, it wasn’t until years after his death in 1944 that his vast influence received widespread critical respect.

  • Interview with Scenters-Zapico As Us Issue 2 (December 2015) Casandra Lopez, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief “As a poet, I’m interested in what art can be created from the anxieties of being from such a place. What can we create from these experiences? I’m a poet, not a rhetorician—it’s not my place to tell you as a reader…

  • Chan, poetry by Hannah Lowe The Asian Review of Books 2017-01-08 Theophilus Kwek From the gangplank of a pre-war steamship to the present, via the jazz underground of 1960s London, Hannah Lowe’s rewarding second collection revels in the company of an unlikely crew of voices and personalities. Chan takes its name from the poet’s father…

  • Barack Obama’s original sin: America’s post-racial illusion The Guardian 2017-01-13 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies Princeton University Illustration by Joe Magee Barack Obama’s refusal to use his position as president to intervene on behalf of African Americans is a stain on his record many activists will never forget In the first hours…

  • Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama The Guardian 2017-01-09 Cornel West, Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility Eight years ago the world was on the…

  • Will Racism End When Old Bigots Die? Code Switch: Race And Identity, Remixed National Public Radio 2017-01-14 Leah Donnella Shelly Fields is a 46-year-old white woman living in Richton Park, a racially diverse Chicago suburb. She says she’s raised her four daughters, who are biracial, to see people of all races as equal, just as…