“[S]ometimes, one of the best ways to better understand racism is to just pick up a book.” As part of a recent tweet about his availability for racial consultation, Colson Whitehead recommended an evergreen Huffington Post piece entitled “16 Books About Race That Every White Person Should Read“, a list that includes Claudia Rankine‘s Citizen, T. Geronimo Johnson‘s Welcome to Braggsville, and The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which we reviewed here. We hope he’s collecting referral fees.
Dear White People
Jeff Sharlet Revisits The Fellowship
Several years ago, Jeff Sharlet closely investigated The Fellowship – a “self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful” – in order to write a book about “how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power.” Now, Sharlet has followed up his initial report with an article about Westmont College, a “feeder school” for the religious movement. This is highly recommended reading for anybody interested in the intersections of power, influence, religious fundamentalism, and American politics.
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Ray Harryhausen Dies at 92
Visual effects virtuoso Ray Harryhausen died this week at the age of 92. Harryhausen was first inspired to take up movie-making when he watched King Kong with his childhood friend Ray Bradbury, and his pioneering career spanned over forty years. Over at Vulture, you can check out a couple of his most well-known scenes. To my mind, though, his best work will always remain Galgo’s creepy, stretch-tastic wizard hand from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
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East of Edam
What goes better together than wine and cheese? Authors and cheese. The Airship paired ten gourmet cheeses with famous writers. Virginia Woolf goes well with a Bayley Hazen Blue. “This Stilton-like blue is a mix of narratives – the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will.”
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Outrage
Barry Ritholtz, the godfather of financial blogging (and not your typical Occupy Wall Street protester) calls the U.S. a “corporate monarchy” and wonders “Why have the Europeans figured out they are getting screwed, and we haven’t?“
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For Her
Leave it to Roxane Gay to come up with a novel format for an essay on the feminist novel. In the new issue of Dissent, she presents eleven theses on the topic, including references to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Sample quote: “Not every novel that concerns itself with the lives of women is a feminist novel. Fifty Shades of Grey is not a feminist novel.” You could also read our own Edan Lepucki on the problem with feminist anthems.
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““[S]ometimes, one of the best ways to better understand racism is to just pick up a book.”
Agreed, but not in the sense Colson means; what good will reading the same old rather obvious and polemical arguments do? (Also: Christ: enough with the logrolling, man).
If you want to be enlightened about Racism in its subtle and pervasive forms, read, for example, Paul Theroux’s “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”, Theroux’s attempt to hit back at VS Naipaul for cutting Theroux off; it is Theroux’s attempt, as well, to paint himself as a Sex/Race White Knight, at Naipaul’s expense, and it backfires *spectacularly*, especially if one read’s Patrick French’s depressingly-frank bio of Naipaul, in which we’re treated to Theroux’s own racist remarks (in letters to Naipaul, during the Writerly courtship). Theroux was a flagship White Liberal of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s… with a Conradian core.
Theroux’s case exemplifies the illuminating paradoxes of genteel Racism… whereas Claudia Rankine’s diary of Race-tinged micro-aggressions (even her publisher uses the term) doesn’t do much more than prove that Life in the big city is tough: people will diss you/ dismiss you for all kinds of reasons, including color/ gender/ weight/ age/ class et al.
It’s the strange (common) case of the Racist Humanists we’d do better to dig into. It’s like: we *know* George Wallace was not a nice man, but did we know about, for example, Kerouac calling a Black writer of his acquaintance a “blue-gummed N-word”… ?