sinspookycosas:

On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City

The white woman across the aisle from me says,
‘Look, look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ‘
as she points out the window past me

into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories

whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. ‘Walden Pond, ‘
the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond? ‘

and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, 

the city I pretended to call my home. ‘Listen, ‘
I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born

and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born.
I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, 
because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place

then nothing would need to be saved.’
But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to bring her an orange juice

back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out

another little piece of her country’s history
while I, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time

somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own. 

                                  — Sherman Alexie

(Source: sinidentidades)

girljanitor:

One of the most whitewashed characters in Fantasy/Science Fiction literature is Ged of the fantasy standard Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Ged and literally everyone except Tenar of the Ring in the entire frickin series has either brown, red-brown, or black skin.

EVERYONE.

Whitewashed on book covers:

Whitewashed in fanart:

Whitewashed most egregiously in the American Sci Fi Channel miniseries:

PLEASE READ URSULA K. LEGUIN’S AMAZING REACTION TO THE WHITEWASHING OF HER WORK : A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi Channel Ruined My Books.

And on the issue of Gedo Senki, studio Ghibli’s production based on the Earthsea series, and the issue of race being slightly more complex and ambiguous considering it is an entirely Japanese production.

Some stills from Gedo Senki:

I found out Leo and Diane Dillon, of whose art I am a huge fan of, did a cover for Earthsea at some point, and it is one of the few that comes close to resembling his skin tone the way it is described in the books:

littledirtyprettythangs:

Book Review: “They Tell Me Of A Home” by Daniel Black

I haven’t written a book review in ages but I felt like I needed to say a few words about this novel I just finished yesterday. Not because I loved, but because I hated it. This book is only the 3rd book I’ve EVER given one lonely ass star to on my Goodreads account, which I’ve had for two years. It was a laborious and frustrating read. I haven’t suffered so much through an entire book since I read “The Help” last year. Let me break it down:

“They Tell Me Of a Home” is a story about a young Black man, Thomas Lee “T.L.” Tyson returning to his small Arkansas town after being gone for ten years. He left to go out into the big world and get a college education and to escape a suffocating and abusive childhood. While T.L. was gone, he didn’t have ANY contact with his family and friends back home in Swamp Creek, Arkansas, save one letter to his baby sister Cynthia, whom they all called “Sista”. Sista was his best friend growing up and he made her swear not to tell anybody about his letter to her.

When we met T.L. he has just earned a doctorate degree in Black Studies and is hopping off the Greyhound bus on the edge of town to go see what’s going on with his family and “find himself”. T.L. arrives home to his cold and distant mother, his older brother Willie James, the family workhorse, his steely and emotionally unavailable father. Sista is dead and buried in the backyard and nobody seems to know how she died, or so they say. It ALL goes downhill from there. 

I’m not going to give away any spoilers here, just in case somebody wants to waste a few hours finding out what the hell happens to these crazy ass people, but let me tell y’all what I found SO DAMN problematic with this story:

The overly ornate language drove me up the proverbial wall. This language was like looking at gaudy Christmas tree from 1975. The flowery prose detracted HEAVILY from the story. Just because you can FIND that many words in your damn thesaurus doesn’t mean you have to USE THEM ALL. Mr.Black’s thesaurus has to be tattered, worn and hanging on by a thread at this point. I felt like he was trying to prove to anybody and everybody how smart he is. That also would explain the excessive name-dropping of Great Black Authors. The way he talked about the Literary Luminaries of the African-American Canon you’d think he himself sprung forth fully formed from the Harlem Renaissance. It was irritating and embarrassing in the same way your friend that takes tickets at the 9:30 Club thinks they’re personal friends with every artist that headlines there and can’t stop talking about them like they know them for real. Ugh.

This story was extremely MELODRAMATIC. Mr.Black had T.L. and everybody else in Swamp Creek doing more whoopin’/hollerin’/pacing/crying/collapsing/screaming/shouting/rolling around in the dirt than the law should allow. Not even going through the stuff that they went through does anybody do that in real life! That brings me to my biggest point of contention with this novel…

This story read as WHOLLY inauthentic because T.L. was clearly a gay Black man but Mr. Black couldn’t be bothered to write him as such. I wasn’t through the first chapter before my Gaydar went off. I kept expecting T.L. to “come out” at some point but it never happened. BUT IT NEEDED TO!! I mean damn…his relationship with his best friend George was CLEARLY one of partners. Straight men don’t talk to each other like that and write what amount to love letters to each other. T.L. was given ONE scene with a woman, after an alleged sexual encounter (because I still don’t believe they did it) and you know what that turned into? That turned into a 10 (Kindle) page discussion on Feminism from what I can ONLY attribute to a gay man! I can’t believe that heterosexual person would say that “If men could bear children, men would chose to procreate with other men because they prefer to deal with their homies instead of the shit they go through to be with women.” Nah, son. You can’t tell me T.L. was straight. And T.L.’s “almost gay” experience in college. Boy, bye. I know gay when I READ GAY. He even spent several pages describing a dream T.L. had in which a male monster and a female monster battled it out for his soul! WHAT??? I felt insulted by that character because if Mr.Black wanted some DRAMA (which he CLEARLY did), making T.L. gay (or at least questioning) would have been perfect and made the story a lot more believable. But he didn’t, so I spent 3 days last week cussin’ at my Kindle as I read the book. This book seems to have served as nothing more as a platform for Mr.Black to work out his issues he has with Black folks’ basic issues: religion, family, homosexuality and the church. 

Man, write another kinda book for all that. I’m not checking for your soapbox soliloquies in the middle of a “novel”. 

I will give Mr.Black full credit for this: He has a MASTERFUL grasp of the skill it takes to write Black American Southern vernacular and dialect. He did an impeccable job at that and I appreciate it. I hate when writers try that and get it wrong. It feels insulting. He also did a good job at resolution, but even that came off as more of his preachy, Go-Tell-It-On-The-Gay-Ass-Mountain, Chile, Lissen To Yo’ Mama life lessons. And they were administered from yet ANOTHER character who should’ve been gay. 

My Book Buddy Nakia of ZoraTonyMaya.tumblr.com said she gave the book 2 stars on Goodreads because the author is Black. Hell no. He gets ONE STAR for simply having the gumption to write a book. Other than that, I ain’t got nothin’ for Daniel Black. That’s including time to read anymore of his books. 

~pbg

velocicrafter:

alunasa:

These photographs show my dialogue with dennisrenaissance about his edited version of the infamous Two Wolves story which as I’m sure you all know by now, is incorrectly attributed to the Cherokee and in fact, originated with Billy Graham.

I’m posting this here because I’ve been sick over the last few days and wanted your feedback on how to further approach him on this issue, and if I should even keep trying for that matter.  I’ll not include my opinions here so that you can draw your own conclusions from the conversation alone.

Oh and for full context, here is the post that I was referencing.
http://dennisrenaissance.tumblr.com/post/21315455847

1. since it’s fiction, it won’t harm him to arbitrarily assign it to a completely made-up group of people
2. “it’s art” or “it’s fiction” are not licenses to perpetuate stereotypes & misinformation. Actually, it’s creative laziness, if anything.
3. the fact that you gave him factual information, he read it & then chose to disregard it—all of this makes him an arrogant colonialist ass & are not marks of a creative individual. It would be completely different if he were creating an entirely new fictive world to place this in, but he’s marking it as a traditional story from a group of people that actually exists.
4. his one “Cherokee Friend” does not speak for all Native Americans, or even all Cherokees. Also, we’re gonna need receipts on that one friend’s Cherokee-ness.
5. a badly written character is a badly written character, no matter the author’s intentions.

(Source: tsisqua)

venusinthefifth:

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda, to Africa, on a bet that he could “bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers’ noses.” He won the bet. 
This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. 
The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. 
Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007) - Sylviane A. Diouf

africanabibliophile:

1890s Blacks were tortured in German concentration camps in Southwest Africa (now called Namibia) when Adolph Hitler was only a child. Colonial German doctors conducted unspeakable medical experiments on these emaciated helpless Africans decades before such atrocities were ever visited upon the Jews.

Thousands of Africans were massacred. Regrettably, historians neglected to properly register the slaughter—that is, to lift it from the footnote in history that it had been relegated to—until now.

In an attempt to give the incidents their rightful recognition in the historical context of the Holocaust, Dr. Firpo W. Carr has authored a new book entitled, Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890–1945. In it, he reveals the startling hidden history of Black victims of the Holocaust. The mayhem and carnage date back to the turn of the 20th century, many years before there were ever any other unfortunate victims—Jew or Gentile—of the Holocaust.

Carr conducted three incredibly revealing interviews with: (1) a Black female Holocaust victim; (2) the Black commanding officer who liberated 8,000 Black men from a concentration camp; and (3) an African American medic from the all-Black medical unit that was responsible for retrieving thousands of dead bodies from Dachau. (White medical units were spared the gruesome task.)

“Kay,” the Black female Holocaust survivor, laments: “You cannot possibly comprehend the anger I have in me because of being experimented on in Dachau, and being called ‘nigger girl’ and ‘blacky’ while growing up.”

Testimonials from the Black commanding officer and African American medic are memorialized, for the first time ever, in Carr’s book. The research is based on voluminous documentation, and more.

If you are like most people, you simply have never heard the unbelievable story of Black victims of the Holocaust. You are invited to read about the human spirit’s triump over events that occurred during this horrible piece of hidden history.