Saturday, June 22, would have been Octavia Butler's 77th birthday (the acclaimed writer died from a fall at age 58 in 2004). Artist Alison Saar has now created a collectible handcrafted edition of Butler's classic, genre-defying 1979 novel, "Kindred," in collaboration with publisher Arion Press. She and Arion creative director Blake Riley spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle about the process of creating the book, which includes 14 original linocuts and is made from a type of paper that Saar says, “looks like cotton that still has some seed and stem in it, the kind of leftover, rougher cotton that enslaved people would be allowed to keep to make their own clothes.”
@davidhmccoy@TheConversationUS@blackmastodon The implication being that you can't find out the black experience by, say, talking to black people and then believing what they say.
My dad had Black Like Me on his bookshelf, as a psychologist. It wasn't merely professional, either. Our Irish ancestry has a darker skin tone than normal, but still 'white', and afro-textured black hair. In the service at the end of WWII he was denied restrooms in Georgia.
I find the inference that posing as black for discovery is just another form of blackface to be very interesting, and a tell of racism, realized or not, within the speaker themself. It's also interesting see how people want to form the line of color on a spectrum that is largely seamless.
Great piece by D. Danyelle Thomas @blackmastodon#StopGenocide#Juneteenth
"No one can truly thrive in a persistently barren land without anything to sustain living. Although there is little in which to take solace, we are not without hope."
💛 “Losing, Reclaiming, and Reconciling My Religion with My Sexuality”
After twenty-two years of searching and trying to make myself into what “I” thought everyone else, including God, wanted me to be, the Lord spoke to me in a manner that was uniquely his own.
—@clayrivers
💛 “The Jim Crow Era Was Never ‘Happy Times’ for Black People”
By @clayrivers
Despite what you may have heard in the news lately, the period of Jim Crow was never nor can it ever be viewed as a period of benefit for Black families.
Last night, Major League Baseball legend Reggie Jackson was asked in a Fox Sports show about how he felt about returning to Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., for a Negro League tribute game. The 78-year-old, who started his MLB career in Birmingham in 1967, did not hold back. He told interviewer Alex Rodriguez about his experience of racial slurs and being denied entry to restaurants and hotels, in a city where the Ku Klux Klan was committing attacks of racial hatred. Here's the story from NBC, including the full video.
@TheConversationUS@blackmastodon Trump doesn’t even have much if any discernible skill. It’s still the Koch family and other oligarchs with a lot more actual wealth than Trump pulling the strings with their overwhelming ability to fund disinformation campaigns that progressively pull people further and further off the rails.
Today is Juneteenth. Michelle Garcia, Editorial Director of NBCBLK, curated Flipboard's Good Life newsletter this week. She chose a range of stories about the past and present of Juneteenth, including a look at the "Harriet Tubman of Texas," the commercialization of the holiday, and the work that still remains. "Now that it's a federal holiday, part of figuring out how to mark the day as a nation comes with educating the public about it," writes Garcia. Here's her Storyboard.
Willie Mays died yesterday at 93. Our sports editor has curated this Storyboard of tributes to an American icon. "His extraordinary statistical accomplishments speak for themselves, but the grace, joy, energy and intellect with which he played the game allowed him to separate himself from other great players of his, or any, era," writes Lincoln Mitchell for @TheConversationUS.