Category: Race and Ethnicity in America
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A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website. Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in…
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by Sherrilyn A. Ifill In the flush of the current presidential campaign, when crowds of blacks and whites caught up in Obama fever chant together, “race doesn’t matter,” and even the mainstream media seems delirious with the possibility that the U.S. may be poised to elect its first black president, it’s hard to remember that…
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by Barbara Katz Rothman It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother’s Black child is running for president of the United States. Who’d have thought? I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe…
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Books are great—we all love books around here—but seeing a writer in person, giving a reading or a talk, can stimulate the intellect, illuminate the work, and delightfully entertain. Mary Oliver is one of Beacon’s most popular writers, and, according to the Poetry Foundation, author of five of the top seven best-selling poetry books last…
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by Christopher Alan Bracey During a recent promotional event for my book, Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, From Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice, a middle-aged African American woman asked me a question that I’ve been hearing a lot these days. Although she agreed with much of what conservatives past…
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by Thomas N. DeWolf The snow is falling outside the home several of us have rented in Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival in support of our cousin Katrina Browne’s film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. It is 19 degrees outside, which is warmer than it has…
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Beacon Author Tom DeWolf (Inheriting the Trade)—who blogged here on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the U.S.—is at the Sundance Film Festival this week with his cousin Katrina Browne, director of Traces of the Trade. The book and the film deal with their shared family history as descendants of…
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by Laila Halaby During graduate school, I worked at the library with an African American girl named Carmon. One quiet Saturday morning, she asked if I would mind trimming her hair. Carmon had handfuls of thin braids that she wanted layered in the back so there would be a cascading effect. We sat outside the…
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Bill Ayers, founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is an expert on urban schooling. He also, incidentally, wrote the excellent Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2005). His blog is pretty low-traffic, so it’s always a great happiness to see him…
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Gayle F. Wald, a professor at George Washington University, is the author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th -Century U.S. Literature and Culture. She wrote the liner notes for a critically acclaimed 2003 Rosetta Tharpe tribute album. Wald lives in…
