Month: October 2016

  • Last time I worshipped in a synagogue was Sept. 5, 2014. And I won’t be going today. That might surprise my friends, who put up with my bragging ad nauseam about how Jewish I am.

  • Behind the Scenes of Loving, the Most Beautiful Love Story Ever Told Vogue 2016-10-17 (November 2016) Danzy Senna photographed by Mario Testino Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, November 2016 Meet Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the brilliant stars of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s sweeping portrait of an interracial couple fıghting for their right to marry in…

  • Society still largely operates under the misapprehension that race (largely defined by skin colour) has some basis in biology. There is a perpetuating idea that black-skinned or white-skinned people across the world share a similar set of genes that set the two races apart, even across continents. In short, it’s what Appiah calls “total twaddle”.…

  • Centering ourselves means using our pain to erase the pain of others. It sends the message that light-skinned suffering—on offshoot of white fragility—is in greater need of addressing than actual anti-Blackness, and the white supremacy that generates it. This is why “mixed” is an identifier I do not use. It is a term which privileges…

  • White Nonsense Vice News 2016-10-09 Elspeth Reeve Alt-right trolls are arguing over genetic tests they think “prove” their whiteness Andrew remembers feeling a “tinge of apprehension” when he logged on to 23andMe. Several weeks earlier, he’d spit into a tube and mailed it to the genetic testing company, which analyzes customers’ DNA to estimate where…

  • Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah says race and nationality are social inventions being used to cause deadly divisions

  • My dad is Black and from the US. My mom is Scottish-Irish. I came out very light skinned. For most of my early childhood I was universally read as white. It wasn’t until I hit puberty and entered into a largely Puerto Rican middle school that I started being seen as Latino—a shock both because…

  • The Pieces of Zadie Smith The New York Times Style Magazine 2016-10-17 Jeffrey Eugenides Briton, Jamaican, mother, writer, female: on becoming whole with one of this generation’s most vital literary voices. ZADIE SMITH IS THERE and not there. In the streaming image on my laptop she sits at a desk, backlit in her book-lined office,…

  • Black Lives Matter Wonderland 2016-10-11 As the Black Lives Matter conversation continues to unfold the world over (BLM crowds stormed London City Airport as Wonderland went to press), we asked Emma Dabari, a teaching fellow at School of African Studies, to organise a debate between a few of London’s most independently-minded young creatives. Emma Dabiri,…

  • Too Black for Mexico — Cécile Smetana Photographs the Afro-Mexicans Stigmatized for the Color of Their Skin FotoRoom 2016-10-10 Photos by Cécile Smetana Baudier 31 year-old French-Danish photographer Cécile Smetana Baudier discusses Diaspora: Costa Chica, a subjective reportage from a coastal area of Mexico where Cécile lived with a minority ethnic group: the Mexicans of African descent. Her…