On September 24, 2017, writer and activist Justina Ireland wrote a review of the YA novel, American Heart by Laura Moriarity. Her review, entitled “American Heart, Huck Finn and the Trap of White Supremacy” is critical of Moriarity’s choice, as a white author, to write a narrative about the American-Muslim experience with a white protagonist. […]
The fight for diversity in publishing is happening on social media. On April 24, 2014 Aisha Saeed one of the founders of We Need Diverse Books tweeted: No diverse authors at #BookCon None. Nada. Zilch. #nowords http://t.co/iGza0WYXHL … #weneeddiversebooks @BookRiot — Aisha Saeed (Amal Unbound Out May 8!) (@aishacs) April 24, 2014 The groundwork for […]
When the Black Panther movie was announced it sparked renewed interest in Afrofuturism. What is it? What are its characteristics? Is the Black Panther even a good example of Afrofuturism? Like all of the great debates of our time, the debate about Afrofuturism happened on social media: on the Elysian plane of reason and measured rhetoric that […]
What is a utopia? What do you imagine? Do you imagine moving sidewalks and flying cars, teleportation machines, world peace? Utopia, defined by Sir Thomas Moore in his book Utopia (1516), is an imaginary place, an ideal state, a visionary system. In 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby imagined a utopia, an idea of an Africa untouched […]
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the American Dream: “I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block association, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.” […]
On April 16, 1963 Martin Luther King sat in a Birmingham jail and wrote a letter. In it, he defended to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference his “untimely and unwise” present activities in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Why Birmingham? “Because injustice is here,” he said. Why protest? “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice […]
In 2014, professional football player Richard Sherman gave a postgame interview heard around the world, an exuberant and adrenaline-infused declaration that he was the best after a miraculous play in a championship game which prompted approximately 623 unique individuals to go on television the following Monday and call him a thug. It seemed that for […]
I play a game at work where I walk down the teen fiction aisle and count the books written by and for marginalized voices. I compulsively monitor their sales numbers and make space for them on displays on which they aren’t included. For over a year I have fought for a diverse fiction display in […]