racism

Tag Archives: racism

Features, Lit Scene, News August 19, 2019

Teju Cole Offers Thoughts on Controversy Over NYT’s Coverage of Trump & Racism, Shares New Spotify Playlist

Days ago on Facebook, Teju Cole made a post about the debate over how The New York Times covers and should cover the US president Donald Trump’s racist statements. The novelist, who is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine, shared a report on CNN and added his perspective. His post in full: […]

#WhyI’mTalkingAboutRace | On African Writers, Empathy, Woke Identity Politics, and Skewed Priorities | Ikhide R. Ikheloa

The South African writer Panashe Chigumadzi published an essay in Africa Is a Country, “Why I’m No Longer Talking to Nigerians About Race: On Writers, Empathy and (Black) Solidarity Politics,” which demands an uncomfortable conversation on race, Black, and African solidarity politics. Our #WhyI’mTalkingAboutRace series features responses. The first is by the Nigerian social and […]

Bessie Head’s Gesture of Madness | By Hugo kaCanham | Essay

Brittle Paper recently published a feature on Bessie Head’s 1991 collection of letters, A Gesture of Belonging. In that essay, Ainehi Edoro took me back to two years ago when Bessie’s letters were the centre of my life. Her story reads like that of my grandmother, my mother and many black women that I know. Her […]

Schoolyard Cannibal | Nana Nkweti | Prose-Poetry

Youth makes you too apt a pupil of coarse lessons it will take decades to unlearn. Your headmistress a family television—ancient, venerable—cased in oak heavy and vast as the Encyclopedia Britannica, entire. Poor, poor pickaninny, pick a program. Poison. Drink in definitions as you sit transfixed on grainy carpet, chin on the kickstand of your […]

Tope Folarin’s LA Review Essay is a Race and Matatu “Dream” with Ngugi and Venus Williams

2013 Caine Prize winner Tope Folarin has a new essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The piece, titled “An Architect of Dreams: On Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross,” touches upon a number of diverse topics including Venus Williams, dreams, racism, matatu, barbershops, and of course, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Folarin’s keen eye […]

“We’re Sad and Sorry” | Read BBC’s Apology to Adichie Over Trump Interview

And so after the heated BBC Newsnight interview where Adichie had to dish out an epic lecture on white and gender privilege to R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. (“I’m sorry, but as a white man, you don’t get to define what racism is”), and the founding editor of the conservative The American Spectator responded by penning an […]

Love Is Not Apolitical | Andile Ndlovu | Fiction

THERE was something about Sanele and Kelvin as a couple that made them so intriguing. No, it was not that he was older than her, or that he was a divorcé. Or that they were a multiracial young couple working in the same building (he worked in the advertising department for the umbrella company, which […]

“The Situation is Fucking Absurd” | Teju Cole Speaks out Against Charlie Hebdo’s Racist Remarks

A little over a year ago, the offices of Paris-based magazine Charlie Hebdo was bombed by terrorists. In the thick of the outrage against what many saw as an attack on freedom of speech, Teju Cole and a few others drew attention to the racist undertones of the magazine’s representation of Islam. Cole argued in a well […]