Tag: anti-racism novels

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Congresswoman Cori Bush, Ibram X. Kendi Discuss Empowerment Factor in Banned Books Movement

Missouri Rep. Cori Bush and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi (Image: Penguin Random House / Janice Checchio)

Missouri Rep. Cori Bush and anti-racism intellectual Dr. Ibram X. Kendi discussed the magnitude of banned books in Washington, D.C., for one of the busiest Banned Books Week observances in recent years.

Holding their conversation at the Anacostia location of the Busboys and Poets bookstore on Thursday, the congresswoman and the author of anti-racist thought focused on the history of banned books, particularly for Black Americans. The event was hosted by The Emancipator, a vertical of The Boston Globe focused on racial justice and equity founded by Ibram.

Earliest censorship in this country began with beating and killing enslaved people for learning to read or being suspected of knowing how to read, they said. That legacy continues with readers now seeing books that share accurate histories and personal narratives of experiences with race and gender being banned, they added.

Banned Books Week is held every year in mid-September, but over the last few years, book bans have been making headlines over more school districts and local libraries removing books, primarily targeted to kids, due to complaints from parents and other adults. Many of these books contain themes surrounding race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Almost half of distinct titles banned are young adult books at 49%, followed by picture books at 19% and middle grade books at 11%, according to PEN America‘s recent report on banned books.

Book bans occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states, meaning 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students have been impacted by a book ban, PEN America found.

Cori and Ibram sat in front of bookshelves with books by authors of color as they emphasized the importance of books giving young people the ability to see worlds different from theirs and how removing access to books is hurting that freedom.

“Some people don’t want to speak about their story, and that’s OK,” the St. Louis congresswoman said. “For those who feel compelled to, when we tell our stories, other people are able to see themselves. Just like you, I didn’t see myself when they made us read Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t see myself when I was made to read The Odyssey, and books like that. I didn’t see myself, and there weren’t books presented before me where I did.”

Cori will tell her own story in The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America, which will be on shelves Oct. 4. Knopf of Penguin Random House is publishing the political memoir.

Ibram is the author of How to Raise an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, published by Penguin Random House imprints Kokila and One World. The power of readers seeing themselves in books brings equity in itself, he said.

“Books are treasures. And they’re not just sort of treasures that reveal wisdom,” he said. “They’re treasures for that person who isn’t able to, or doesn’t have the ability to, travel around the world. But they can travel around the world into time through books. It’s a democratizer.

“But I also think as you mentioned that there’s something beautiful about the power of seeing your own story in the mirror through a book, and I also see the differences,” adds the humanities professor and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. “There’s just something affirming. There’s just this connective tissue that allows human beings to connect.”

The conversation is available on YouTube.

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#StopAsianHate Anti-Racism Literary Posts to Check Out

phrase racism is pandemic on signboard
Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

The mass shooting in the Atlanta area that took the lives of eight people, mostly women of Asian descent, on Tuesday has devastated the nation. On a weekend that will be marked with anti-Asian racism protests, we must acknowledge the uptick of violence against Asian Americans in the past year due to how the last presidential administration purported the root of the COVID-19 pandemic.

she lit celebrates the literary lifestyle with a focus on stories written by women of color. The content leans toward the contributions of Black women since it’s headed by a Black woman, but we’re always open to more stories uplifting the literary works of all women, womxn, and womyn. Below are a few past posts that can help you seek out stories focusing on the Asian American female perspective.

Kidlit Author Kelly Yang Says She Was Called a Racial Slur While Teaching Class

At the beginning of the pandemic, authors donated their time to teach students in virtual classrooms. But some female authors of color like Kelly Yang said she saw a student call her a “Chinese virus” in the Zoom chat. She said she received an apology days later after going public, but the incident shows how children are being taught to hate.

Book Review: ‘Know My Name’ by Chanel Miller

For years, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, the young woman who had been raped by Stanford University swimming standout Brock Turner. His six-month sentence that was shortened into a three-month jail term resulted in national outrage. As the outrage simmered down on the cusp of the #MeToo movement, Chanel revealed her true identity and released her memoir soon after. She talks about her yearslong ordeal and how she felt being half Chinese fueled the anxiety of telling her story as a rape victim. Best on audiobook in which she narrates.

Book Review: ‘Minor Feelings’ by Cathy Park Hong

Author Cathy Park Hong wrote a series of essays exploring her Asian identity and what it means to be an Asian American woman. She examines her upbringing in Los Angeles, particularly during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising that pitted the African American and Korean American communities against each other that culminated in a catastrophic loss to Korean businesses. Coining the phrase “minor feelings” for Asian women’s stories failing to be magnified in the public, she also remembers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean-American writer and artist who was murdered in 1982, and Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese-American activist who worked with Malcolm X and was present at his assassination.

‘The Claudia Kishi Club’ Shows Love to Beloved ‘Baby-sitters Club’ Member

For a lighter piece, Asian American creatives discuss their favorite The Baby-Sitters Club member, the artistically fabulous Claudia Kishi. They mention the Japanese American character’s contributions such as offering the bedroom for club meetings and the private line used to conduct business. Author Ann M. Martin created a character who fought model minority stereotypes like Claudia’s inaptitude for math, but racial stereotypes remained between the pages like the forever description of Claudia’s eyes as “almond-shaped.” The Netflix documentary is 17 minutes, so a perfect quick show to check out as you Netflix and chill.

Gold House Book Club Plans to Explore Works by Asian Writers

Gold House, a nonprofit collective celebrating the contributions of Asian American artists, started a book club last fall. With the inaugural selection of Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club, the book club is designed to read works by writers of Asian descent and discuss the stories and their cultural impact. If you’re looking for anti-Asian racism literary resources, check out the book club’s picks.

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Author Natasha Diaz Wants Us to Know Black Jewish Stories Matter

When Natasha Díaz discovered her debut novel was excluded from a Black Jewish book list, she went to Twitter to air her frustrations that led to a conversation on multiracial Jewish literature.

Natasha’s young adult novel Color Me In features a sixteen-year-old protagonist who moves in with Black mother’s family after her parents divorce, but her White Jewish father wants to throw her a belated bat mitzvah. The change in surroundings and circumstances heightens the racial and religious intolerance, according to the publisher Penguin Random House imprint Ember, but the teenager who’s usually quiet tries to find her voice amid the noise. On her author website, she says the book is “inspired by my experiences as a white passing, multiracial woman.”

In June, Natasha tweeted she had submitted the book that was first published in 2019 to the Association of Jewish Libraries for inclusion in its list of Black Jewish literature in light of the George Floyd protests. She said the association refused to add her book to the list.

The Association of Jewish Libraries created a list that includes the YA best-seller Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert, which comes from Little, Brown & Co. Books for Young Readers about a Black girl who’s trying to deal with her White Jewish stepbrother’s mental illness. The list is the seventh installment in the association’s Love Your Neighbor series, an initiative to promote works by Jewish authors in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh.

By mid-June, Natasha started a campaign asking for followers to amplify Black Jewish writers whether they were published or unpublished. Within two months, she penned the article “What It’s Like to Be a Black Jewish Writer” in Alma, a digital media outlet focused on pop culture content about Jewish women.

I never read a character who was grappling with where to fit, how to own her whole self, and also how to take accountability for white presenting privilege, in a book. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s my life, and while I was so incredibly proud to learn my book was “a first,” I couldn’t help but also feel infinitely sad that my Black Jewish experience, which is so impacted by my proximity to whiteness, is the only one to travel through the traditional publishing channels and represent young Black Jews in children’s literature.

In the article, she has a roundtable discussion that includes Marra Gad, the author of the award-winning memoir The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl from Agate Publishing, and Rachel Harrison-Gordon, the filmmaker behind Broken Bird about a Black Jewish girl preparing for her bat mitzvah. Also in August, Natasha was interviewed by the Jewish Book Council and discussed her book’s impact.

Perhaps one of the most visible Black Jewish authors is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of writing legend Alice Walker, who wrote about her multiethnic upbringing in her first memoir, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, published by Penguin Random House in 2002. Rebecca is the author and editor of seven books, including a debut novel called Adé: A Love Story, originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. and Amazon Publishing Co. in 2013. A year later, pop icon Madonna was set to direct a film based on the book.

Meanwhile, Natasha continues to discover and elevate multiracial and Black Jewish writers on social media who still battle deep-rooted hatred from within the White Jewish community and antisemitism outside the community.

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Book Review: ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’ by Mariah Carey

The Meaning of Mariah CareyThe Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

*Reviewed by a dedicated member of the Lambily who has waited for this story for three decades*

The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey is an in-depth celebrity memoir that highlights the intersection of racial and familial trauma and how the world-famous songstress converted the pain into laser focus on talent exploration and superstardom success.

Mariah clarifies that this is her story from her perspective as she describes her family in the negative light that she viewed them. The story starts with Mariah’s childhood that hints at trauma described in many of her songs from “Outside” on the Butterfly album to “Petals” on the Rainbow album. The youngest of three children, Mariah is years apart from her teenage brother Morgan and sister Allison, who were both already showing signs of psychological damage from growing up in an interracial family in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. Mariah also has the fairest complexion that makes her a target of sibling abuse ranging from her brother exhibiting violence to the point where cops are called to her sister pimping her out to a grown man. Race plays a huge part with her Black father and White mother and seeps into her upbringing as she lives with her mother in a White section of Long Island and visits her father in Black Harlem. The location forces Mariah to attend predominantly White schools where she’s called racial slurs on an everyday basis for being Black. Then when she hangs out with her father and her Black cousins on the weekend she feels her complexion comes up in the question of her paternity. One of the issues that bothers little Mariah the most is that her mother never could wrangle her curls. The untidiness of her appearance brings self-esteem down even more until her opera singer mother trains her to sing, and music becomes Mariah’s saving grace.

A major portion of the book covers a few chapters on her tumultuous marriage to Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola, who discovered her and became her first husband. Mariah goes into detail about how what looks like a storybook fairy tale romance is slow torture to her twentysomething self. She even calls the mansion in upstate New York she shared with Tommy “Sing Sing” like the infamous prison. Metaphorically, she describes the luxurious baths she would take as washing off the Mariah Carey persona to become an unhappy housewife. The mental abuse is more described here with what Mariah calls Tommy’s incessant anger that was shown to her all the time and visible to others in his inner circle.

There are explanations for some of her obsessions that have been magnified in the media to make her seem frivolous. For example, she connects with her idol Marilyn Monroe after seeing her in film as a young girl and learning little Norma Jeane Mortenson also had a tumultuous childhood. Mariah is “eternally twelve” because the physical and emotional abuse hit a fever pitch at that age where she wishes she could be a regular kid.

Like Mariah said on her book tour, what she says is unimportant is not in the book from the highly publicized engagement and breakup with Aussie billionaire James Packer to the highly publicized stint and battle on American Idol with rapper Nicki Minaj. She also brilliantly throws shade at other highly publicized events from her career to show the media monster she’s over it. And shade is hinted toward Jennifer Lopez, who Mariah claims she does not know, and now we know the subtle beef started way before the meme.

Overall, this is an extraordinary celebrity memoir by Mariah, along with her co-writer and Black cultural writer Michaela Angela Davis, that emphasizes her biracial identity and how that impacted her family and her drive. Because of the depth, it’s recommended to read the actual book though the audiobook is also an excellent choice due to the amount of well-known lyrics within the chapters. There is a lot of digging deep into the construct of race and how it could destroy individuals with Mariah describing her journey of working to overcome the obstacles placed in her path.

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Book Review: ‘Punching the Air’ by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Punching the AirPunching the Air by Ibi Zoboi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I say
That maybe
I was punching
All the walls
They put around me
Around us

I was punching
The air
The clouds
The sun


Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five illustrates a heart-wrenching portrayal of a Black teen boy trying to find what joy he has left in juvenile hall after being accused of putting a White teen boy into a coma.

Amal is a regular sixteen-year-old Black boy growing up in New York when he finds himself in a courtroom fighting charges that he put a White boy from another neighborhood into a coma. He gets sent to juvie, where he taps his artistic and poetic ability as best as he can, but he’s deterred at every corner. The other boys are volatile and the adults are judgmental. Poetry class is his only outlet, but Amal struggles with the work the instructor wants him to put into his poems. Then his artistry clicks for him, and this leads to him repainting a mural in the common area where the boys meet up with their families. Amal becomes known as “Young Basquiat,” a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat, until that morsel of happiness is taken away from him, and his life seems to be precariously hanging in the balance again.

The entire story is told in verse. This young adult novel differs from others exploring the racial justice movement since the main character is in actual custody and his freedom depends solely on what a White boy says, only if he wakes up from his coma. How a Black boy’s life depends on a White boy’s testimony shows readers the racial dynamics even kids are dealing with. They had gotten into a fight that went too far. Amal says he didn’t throw the harmful blow that put Jeremy in a coma. The boys don’t know each other because Amal and his friends crossed over the physical boundaries of their neighborhood that separate Black and White families with markers of housing, education, resources, and opportunities.

Mental health is a major theme. One way Amal tries to stay grounded is through his Islamic faith. It’s refreshing to see a Black Muslim teen in a young adult novel because the religion is rarely seen in the genre, and when it is, it seems to belong to a Middle Eastern kid instead. Amal’s faith ties him to his mother, who reminds him to pray five times a day. He knows he stands out as a devout Muslim in juvie, and his faith remains under threat inside those gray walls behind bars. Amal also struggles with his poetry and art in the dreary environment. The story examines the power of art for youth since it represents healthy expression. When art is taken away by adults to cause detriment, a teen’s mental health could deteriorate, especially if they’re in a situation like juvie.

Overall, the novel dives into a serious issue of incarcerated teens and those teens looking for any glimpse of bright light they can capture to strengthen themselves. The co-author Yusef Salaam was one of the five Black and Latino teen boys found guilty in the Central Park jogger rape case in 1989. Salaam and Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise are now considered the Exonerated Five after they were exonerated in 2002 when the real rapist had been located through DNA testing. The novel is based on Salaam using his passion for art during his years behind bars also waiting for the truth to be revealed. That’s the most powerful aspect of this book: how race plays a part in who is trusted with the truth.

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Book Review: ‘The Black Kids’ by Christina Hammonds Reed

The Black KidsThe Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed features a Black teen girl living in the wealthier outskirts of Los Angeles during the 1992 uprising, but the historical event’s impact falls between the cracks as the main character stays on the sidelines.

Ashley is a well-to-do Black girl living in the hills in an all-White neighborhood where even her own neighbors sit outside on the lawn as a pretend patrol. Ashley’s older sister Jo is considered rebellious and moves away to live in the Crenshaw and Koreatown area of the city, which eventually become hotspots during the unrest. Also, Lucia, Ashley’s nanny, is planning to move back to her native Guatemala with her family. And Ashley’s parents are off focused on their demanding careers. Then on April 29, 1992, the Rodney King verdict comes down. The unarmed Black man beaten by four LAPD officers the year prior doesn’t see justice as those officers are acquitted. Hours later, the city of LA is afire, dredging up a level of racial tension unseen in a generation. But Ashley still wants to fit in with her White friends at her White private school. She starts a rumor about Black male classmate with a promising basketball future being criminally involved in the uprising. Then all of a sudden she recognizes the microaggressions she had been dealing with for years from her White girlfriends. As she questions what’s happening to the city, her uncle drops off his daughter at Ashley’s home to stay focused on saving the family’s vacuum store threatened by the fires. How the uprising is affecting her family leads to even more revelations. She’s starting to see how race impacts her life. The tension pressurizes for days until it explodes at prom where Ashley experiences the ultimate betrayal from her so-called friends and realizes which friendships need to be killed and which ones need to be nurtured.

Ashley’s life and surroundings seem relatable today though it’s a story taking place almost 30 years ago. The author does a great job with framing the time element to make teen readers feel closer to the story.

The writing is flowery but gets convoluted with throwing the actual events of 1992 on the shelf in favor of character backstory every few pages. The amount of flashbacks bury the current moment. Though the flashbacks are interesting and intimate, they clog up the story development as it moves at a slow pace. With Ashley as the main character, she is also living the uprising precariously through other characters who seem to be more in the action or more affected like her sister Jo and her cousin Morgan. Showing the story from the characters who are in the heat of the uprising would’ve been more interesting. Ashley tends to be too aware where her voice comes off more adultish as she quickly picks up on the deep meaning of what’s going on around her. It’s noticeable via the audiobook where actress Kiersey Clemons gives the story a gloomy feel.

Overall, the synopsis feels a bit misleading with the focus on the 1992 LA uprising since the main character is physically removed from the situation therefore trying too hard emotionally to be involved with it. The more exciting story would be around the characters in the middle of the uprising. It’s a novel where you would want another character’s perspective or have the perspectives change every chapter.

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‘The Vanishing Half’ Highlights Racial Passing Along with Previous Well-Known Novels

Perched on The New York Times Best Sellers list for the past four weeks with an HBO miniseries in the works, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is the anti-racism novel we need right now as the country grips with another tide of facing race relations.

The Vanishing Half, a novel in the 350-page range in the hardcover format, follows light-skinned Black twin sisters as they run away from their unique Louisiana town with only people of their complexions to New Orleans in the 1950s. As they adjust to their new lives, one twin disappears without a trace to pass as White to marry her White boss while the other one returns home after her abusive marriage to a dark-skinned Black man.

The colorism conversation when it comes to “passing”—when someone decides to disguise themselves in another race or ethnicity for a better quality of life—has been seen in previous books from decades prior when the act was practiced more often.

Passing was more common in the early 20th century amid the Great Migration and European immigration defining the big cities. Mostly when passing is mentioned, it’s in reference to Blacks with complexions light enough to pass as White, but European immigrants also practiced this with some considered to have darker skin like Italians passing for Jews, Jews passing for Gentiles, Poles passing for Germans, and Whites passing for Blacks, according to Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature by Werner Sollors.

At the end of The Vanishing Half, Brit says she was inspired by Imitation of Life, more the 1959 film rather than the 1933 novel it was based on by White Jewish author Fannie Hurst, who came under fire at the time for stereotypical presentations of the Black mother character as a Mammy figure and her light-skinned daughter as a tragic mulatta passing as White. Culturally, it’s become a cinematic classic with Black mothers using the film as a cautionary tale for their Black daughters to not neglect their matriarchs under any circumstances, especially for White privilege.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Fannie also was a secretary for now-celebrated author Zora Neale Hurston while famed poet Langston Hughes created a satire play of Imitation of Life that reversed the roles with a Black family and a White maid. For insight on the tumultuous friendship of Zora and Langston mainly due to their relationships with others in the movement and their disagreements about their plays, check out Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal by Yuval Taylor.

The practice of passing has left holes in Black families since the end of slavery, and it’s a topic that’s still relevant today as people may or may not defend their ethnicities based on their looks. Nella Larsen, a biracial author from the Harlem Renaissance wrote a 1929 novel called Passing, a tale about two Black childhood friends in 1920s New York who are both light-skinned enough to pass as White. One woman does pass while the other stays in the Black community, similar to The Vanishing Half. Starring actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, Passing will be a film set for release this year, according to IMDb.

Nella, a daughter of a Danish woman and a Danish West Indian man, was considered a rising star in the Harlem Renaissance with Passing and her only other novel Quicksand. After becoming the first Black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship that she used for an artistic journey through Europe, she returned to New York and her nursing career, shedding her novelist life. With growing up in an all-White family after her father died and her mother remarried, her novels are considered semi-autobiographical.

The Passing film’s directors, Deborah Riley Draper and Jennifer Galvin, are also developing a TV series on the book described as “Downton Abbey meets Get Out.” And with The Vanishing Half also being turned into a miniseries for TV, stories on the history of racial passing, particularly for Black women, may gain more attention.

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Book Review: ‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing HalfThe Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a riveting tale of two Black sisters who are so light-skinned that one decides to pass as White while the other accepts who she is. It delves into race and complexion but also into family ties ruptured by one person leaving the family by choice.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are twins living in Mallard, Louisiana, a town purposely populated by light-skinned Blacks. Desiree, the more outgoing and outspoken twin, conjures up a plan for her and Stella to leave town at sixteen. They sneak away from their home and end up in bustling New Orleans in 1954. They find work until one day Stella disappears without a trace.

The novel moves ten years forward with Desiree making the journey back to Mallard with her young daughter Jude. The townspeople notice right away how dark-skinned Jude is. When Desiree returns to her mother, she tells her she hasn’t seen Stella in years.

Unbeknownst to her family who she kills off when anyone asks about their whereabouts, Stella is making a life in Los Angeles with her husband Blake and young daughter Kennedy. Except Stella is living a lie: She is passing for White. Her struggle to keep the secret haunts her as she’s known around their White neighborhood in Brentwood as sometimes being moody and quiet. When a Black actor and his family fight to buy a home in the neighborhood, Stella worries her life will be ruined since she’s avoided her own people for so long to avoid her cover from being blown. Putting her Karen tendencies to the side, she decides to make friends with the Black mother living across the street from her and they become fast friends—something neighbors start gossiping about.

Years later, Jude heads to UCLA with the goal to find Stella. She doesn’t tell her mother that she thinks the missing twin is in LA, but she stumbles upon Kennedy and makes the connection that it’s her cousin. The two try to be family as Kennedy is conflicted about who she is, now knowing that her mother has been lying her entire life.

The literary fiction novel jumps timelines intersecting the twin sisters and their separate lives with their daughters who know the emotional strain the separate lives have brought upon the family. It’s reminiscent of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng with the writing and storytelling style through characters’ various secrets. It’s definitely a graduation from the author’s debut novel The Mothers, which is a great debut novel also diving into secrets within a contemporary community.

At the end, the author says she was inspired by Imitation of Life, more the 1959 film rather than the novel by White Jewish author Fanny Hurst, who came under fire at the time for stereotypical presentations of the Black mother character as a Mammy figure and her light-skinned daughter as a tragic mulatta passing as White. The “passing” technique has left holes in Black families since the end of slavery, and it’s a topic that’s still relevant today as people may or may not defend their ethnicities based on their looks. With the conversation of race, this novel is a good choice under the anti-racism reads to emphasize how some people give up their old lives as one race for new lives under another race due to the opportunities they feel they couldn’t get before.

Overall, it’s an engrossing piece interlacing the lives of two sisters who don’t know where the other is because one becomes obsessed with dodging obstacles surrounding race until she evolves into a new person with a new past that subtracts her bloodlines.

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YA Author Kimberly Jones Explains Civil Unrest Logic in Viral Video

A young adult author’s video interview discussing how race, socioeconomic status, and history are the root of the latest civil unrest has gone viral.

Kimberly Jones, the co-author of the young adult novel I’m Not Dying With You Tonight along with Gilly Segal, passionately spelled out why people are protesting, rioting, or looting after the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. His death has sparked nationwide civil unrest as the U.S. slowly comes out of the COVID-19 quarantine.

In a George Floyd tribute T-shirt, Kimberly says she supports both viewpoints from Black people saying they don’t want rioting or looting in our communities and they don’t want to support mainstream White-centric businesses. She then breaks down the difference between protestors, rioters, and looters—a definition that the media struggles with in its reporting, which leads to people misunderstanding the situation such as in the example with the Red Sofa Literary Agency founder who called police on people she classified as looters last month.

“Let’s ask ourselves why in this country in 2020 the financial gap between poor Blacks and the rest of the world is at such a distance that people feel like their only hope and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it,” Kimberly says in the video.

“But they are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bed, getting that phone, whatever it is they’re going to get because in that moment when riots happen and they present an opportunity of looting that’s their only opportunity to get it. We need to be questioning that. Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food-insecure, that clothing-insecure?”

What also helped the video go viral is her Monopoly comparison to how economics work in America.

“If I right now decided to play Monopoly with you and for four hundred rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money,” she says, pointing to the four centuries that Black people have been in the U.S. dealing with injustice after injustice. “I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. I didn’t allow for you to have anything. And then we play another fifty rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you.

“That was Tulsa, that was Rosewood. Those were places we built Black economic wealth, and we were self-sufficient. We owned our stores. When we owned our property. And they burned them to the ground.”

She refers to the race massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923 in which White mobs destroyed thriving Black communities. Descendants of people who were impacted by those massacres are calling for reparations.

In a tweet, Kimberly wrote, “I just took the time to go through the first hundred or so responses in this thread and I am FLOORED! The support is so welcome and overwhelming.”

https://twitter.com/kimlatricejones/status/1269275215663685635

Titled “How Can We Win,” the video interview is on YouTube via David Jones Media and has a timestamp of being posted on June 1 and the interview conducted on May 31. David Jones wrote in the video’s summary:

“On day two, Sunday the 31st, he activated his dear friend author Kimberly Jones to tag along and conduct interviews. During a moment of downtime he captured these powerful words from her and felt the world couldn’t wait for the full length documentary, they needed to hear them now.”

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Matthew A. Cherry, who recently received the golden Oscar statue for his six-minute film and accompanying book Hair Love illustrated by Vashti Harrison, shared the video on June 5.

Authors like Angie Thomas and Jason Reynolds were quick to point out that Kimberly is a Black author who deserves the support with the purchase of her book. Harper Collins Publishers’ Epic Reads even chimed in.

According to the book’s description, “I’m Not Dying with You Tonight follows two teen girls―one Black, one White―who have to confront their own assumptions about racial inequality as they rely on each other to get through the violent race riot that has set their city on fire with civil unrest.”

The video is approaching half a million views on YouTube.

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Book Review: ‘When They Call You a Terrorist’ by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter MemoirWhen They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir written by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and co-written by asha bandele explores Patrisse’s journey growing up poor in Van Nuys area of Los Angeles and how that led to co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement. I read the book for research on the 1992 LA uprising, which is mentioned once in passing, but the book is very relevant in light of the protests across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd.

The memoir starts with a quote from Assata Shakur and a foreword by Angela Davis, emphasizing the civil rights activism message. Patrisse is raised by a single mother in Van Nuys in an impoverished barrio, a mere mile away from the wealthy neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, now known in the black community as where the fictional Black-ish family lives. She has two brothers and a sister, but she watches her brothers get stopped by the police often as teens, and one of her brothers, who’s later diagnosed with schizophrenia, eventually lives a life in and out of prison. She’s loved by her father but learns he is not her biological father, so she develops a relationship with her biological father, who also is in and out of prison. She describes both those relationships with love to focus on the importance of fathers in a black girl’s life. By the time she’s in her teens, she senses she belongs to the LGBTQ community and makes lifelong friends. She’s on the road to becoming an activist for people like her, but the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 leads her and fellow activists to form Black Lives Matter to raise their voices for black people killed at the hands of police and racists.

Her story is beautifully written in a poetic prose that remains in present tense throughout, which is rare for a memoir where the past is in past tense. The attention to which details to share is extraordinary as well. She points out the autobiographical details that informed her activist path such as walking down the street as a kid with her mentally ill brother and watching the police frisk him over nothing. It was difficult to put down the book with the flow of the words and the story.

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Book Review: ‘Such a Fun Age’ by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun AgeSuch a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid is a tale about a millennial black woman who gets caught between her white boss and her white boyfriend after a racial incident while on the job leaves her vulnerable. Though the book rides on the racial divide, it fails to make the characters likeable and the main character is riding in the backseat of her own story.

Emira Tucker is partying with her friends when she gets a call from a couple, the Chamberlains, she regularly babysits for. She ditches the party while in her party clothes to save toddler Briar from her parents as they deal with an unexpected situation in their home. With an upscale grocery store down the street, Emira decides to take Briar there to buy time. Being a black woman in a skimpy dress baby-sitting a young white girl rings the alarm for one customer. Soon, the security guard is asking Emira why she has custody of Briar, assuming some type of kidnapping. The event escalates then cools off when Mr. Chamberlain shows up.

Emira doesn’t want to talk about the event, but the wife and mother, Alix Chamberlain, a well-to-do lifestyle expert, wants to take Emira under her wing by offering Emira more gigs and getting other ways for her to take care of things around the house. Emira doesn’t pick up on any changes because she’s desperate for money.

Soon, Emira meets Kelley, a white guy she remembered seeing at the store during the incident. In fact, he taped the incident and tries to convince Emira to approve its release. She doesn’t want to. Kelley then goes out of his way to date Emira, and they become an item. But it turns out Alix and Kelley have history with each other that dates back to high school when they were dating until a racial profiling incident ends their relationship.

With Kelley thinking he knows Alix’s motives around Emira with Alix growing up with black nannies, he also may have a motive of his own with only dating women of color. As they bicker about who will reveal themselves to Emira, Emira is oblivious to everything going on around her, including not taking the lead on her own life with being reduced to just baby-sitting Briar as a college graduate.

After the secrets between Alix and Kelley are revealed, Emira takes note and eventually finds her happy ending. But it takes too long for Emira to wake up. She doesn’t want the video of the incident to get out, but she’s not vocal enough expressing her concerns about safety if the video surfaces publicly. Because the incident fades more and more throughout the book and then pops up again, her character personality gets faded, too. She’s a Temple University grad, but she’s baby-sitting and doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life at 25 years old. Many black women college graduates have more direction, so this part of the story falls flat. Why is she not ambitious? Why is she half-awake? If the why is there, then that also falls flat.

Also, I don’t know a lot of black women who would subject themselves to being that close to a white family that they work with. Even at 25, that’s something they would handle delicately if ever in that situation. Emira’s devotion to Briar mirrors that of Aibileen in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, where the “you is kind, you is smart, you is important” speech that Viola Davis voiced as the character onscreen to the little white girl she’s responsible for is still a running joke.

Emira comes alive with her friends, but there’s too much focus on the Ebonics within their interactions to the point their conversations have no meaning; they’re just using a blaccent to be using a blaccent. On Good Morning America for a Black History Month literary segment, author Kiley Reid said, “As I’ve been touring, a lot of black women have said, ‘This is the first book I’ve read where I hear me and my friends talking,’ so I’m so glad they can hear themselves in it.” Black women readers told me NOT to read this book. They couldn’t explain why, just shook their heads no.

It’s hard to explain why we needed this to be the story that brings up race and privilege. The issues are dropped into the storyline but among unlikable, stereotypical characters who don’t know how to play with those themes. With a future film coming out, this book can come off stronger like Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, where those themes are more emphasized onscreen, making the story more entertaining.

Overall, this book is hard to decipher as a story that’s relatable and necessary to strike the conversation the publisher is pushing in its marketing strategy for readers to have.

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Book Review: ‘The Revisioners’ by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

The RevisionersThe Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Well, she’s coming over a bit,” I say.
They look up from their food at that, a mix of concern and shock wrinkling their faces.
“Coming by to do what?” Link asks. She has set her fork down.
“Just to talk, she’s lonely.” I already regret saying as much as I’ve said. There was no need to is all. “She can’t have a baby,” I add.
“I could prepare my bath with white women’s tears,” Link says.
“Not just yours but all of ours,” Theron adds.

The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton compares the lives of a single biracial mother who goes to live with her white grandmother in current times and her black great-great-great grandmother who befriends her new white neighbor in the 1920s. What they both learn is that they shouldn’t have trusted the white women because at the end of the day their unapologetic blackness will always cause division.

In 2017, New Orleans native Ava recently left her husband, lost her paralegal job, and is now raising her teen son, King, alone. To cut costs and save money, she accepts an invitation from her white grandmother, Martha, to live in her family mansion. Ava’s black mother, Gladys, warns her daughter to not live with the grandmother she barely knew because her white father was barely there and neither was his family. Ava takes Grandma Martha’s invitation as a way to fix the past between them and start anew. She takes care of her aging grandmother but notices microaggressions against her and her son that she struggles to ignore. As she adapts to her new life, she sees King doing the same, including falling for a white girl at his school. When Grandma Martha’s actions (and admissions) go too far, Ava rethinks her living situation.

In 1924, Ava’s maternal ancestor, Josephine, is dealing with her son, Major, getting married to Eliza, a woman she’s unsure about because of how the couple treats Major’s son from another marriage, Jericho, differently. While Josephine helps take care of Jericho while her son and his new wife adjust to their new home, a white woman stops by her door. It turns out to be a new neighbor named Charlotte, a mousy woman who’s obviously being beaten by her husband. She wants Josephine to help her conceive because she heard rumors of Josephine being able to manifest, or “revision,” such events and they happen. Because she feels pity for the woman, Josephine invites Charlotte into her home. They meet regularly and share baked goods until Charlotte, upset she can’t carry a baby to term, turns her back on Josephine by secretly joining the Ku Klux Klan. Charlotte’s connections then threaten Josephine’s family when a land dispute erupts between the neighbors.

In 1855, young enslaved Josephine is realizing her Revisioner powers with her mother and father teaching her. On the plantation, she becomes a play partner for the owner’s daughter, Miss Sally. Josephine shows her powers to Miss Sally, who eventually asks if she could help her mother conceive. When Missus gets pregnant, Miss Sally is gracious and she and Josephine get closer to the point where Josephine reveals she wants to use her power to be free. Miss Sally laughs, but Josephine keeps the rest of her secret that her parents and another mysterious slave, Jupiter, are preparing to flee.

Both the relationships Ava and Josephine strike with the white women in their lives end up in disaster. Early in the book, for example, Grandma Martha accidentally bumps into a lamp that’s the only heirloom Ava has from Josephine. Though Grandma Martha doesn’t know it’s Josephine’s lamp, the author weaves in the distrust the characters feel for each other over deeply rooted racial issues. Gladys doesn’t feel comfortable with Ava living with Grandma Martha and would rather have her daughter live with her and study to become a doula like her, like Josephine. From the start, Josephine’s friends and family explain to Josephine that she shouldn’t become friends, let alone trade niceties, with Charlotte, as evidenced in the quote above.

Overall, the book shows the history of a bloodline shared by strong black women, with a few having a soft heart for women outside of their race that leads to a hard-learned lesson. They learn though they share a womanly connection it could mean nothing due to racial differences. It reads smoothly flowing through the parts of Ava and the two parts of Josephine, where we see her as a child slave and as a free woman. It’s an interesting story, especially with the juxtaposition of Ava and Josephine living a century apart in the same place and dealing with the same problems but with different outcomes.

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Ibi Zoboi Talks Writing Process With Yusef Salaam in New YA Book

Award-winning young adult author Ibi Zoboi and Dr. Yusef Salaam shared their writing process on their upcoming YA book.

On Instagram Live Wednesday, Ibi explained how she infused her writing into Yusef’s poetry in Punching the Air. It tells the story of 16-year-old Amal Shahid, a Black Muslim teen pursuing poetry and art, who finds himself in prison after “an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy,” according to the publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

During the video chat, Ibi wore a T-shirt printed with art by Yusef that he named “Born Brave” and had designed while wrongfully convicted for seven years over the 1989 rape of a White female jogger. He was a part of the Central Park Five, the group of four Black teens and one Latino teen blamed for the infamous crime. They became known as the Exonerated Five after filmmaker Ava DuVernay brought their story to Netflix last year in When They See Us. The group was exonerated in 2002 after the identity of the real rapist was discovered. Yusef was 15 when he went to jail.

While in jail, Yusef found ways to create art and poetry with the tools he could find like a pin in his clothes.

“Art is a completely liberating meditative process,” he said in the chat. “When you get the opportunity to delve into it and be free with it, you don’t really know where it’s going to go. And the beauty of it is when you finish coming out of the meditation and see what you’ve created, it’s like, ‘Wow.'”

Attendees were allowed to ask questions, and the first question focused on how Ibi and Yusef co-wrote the book.

“I’m the writer and Yusef is the storyteller in this situation,” Ibi said. “It was collaborative in the storytelling process, and I could not have written this book without Yusef’s input and Yusef’s history and Yusef’s mindset.”

She said while Yusef was busy promoting When They See Us she was hard at work. “While he was doing that, I was typing away and really having conversations with him, so in that sense he was the storyteller and I was the writer and transcriber, and Yusef was giving me ideas.”

Though they didn’t go into detail about the specific crime that leads Amal to trouble, the co-authors said the crime is inspired by their upbringings in segregated 1980s New York. They also said they didn’t want to apply Yusef’s real story to the novel.

Ibi and Yusef said they were inspired by the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teen, who was killed by a White teen mob in the predominantly White section of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn after inquiring about a car for sale with his friends. His group was mistaken for another group going to a birthday party of a girl one of the White boys had a relationship with.

The authors also recalled the Jena Six case of six Black teens in Jena, Louisiana who had beaten a White classmate in 2006. The incident followed a Black teen at their local high school trying to sit in a part of the courtyard reserved for White kids. The Jena Six received attention from civil rights leaders after they had been heavily charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Since this incident occurred before social media took off, Ibi said we tend to have a collective amnesia about racially charged events.

“I was scared to write this story, but I knew I could lean on you,” Ibi told Yusef. “I couldn’t have never written this story without you at all. One of things I asked you is whether or not you were OK with me as a woman telling this story and do you remember what you told me?”

“Absolutely,” Yusef said. “I don’t remember exactly what I told you, but there’s a certain power from a woman telling a story that can’t be not from a woman. I’m thinking about my mother as a nurturer. I’m thinking about Ava DuVernay as a master storyteller, who can take something out of the world …. I want to say I was so blessed to be able to have you in that space.”

Ibi and Yusef met in 1999 while they were both attending Hunter College in New York. American Street, Ibi’s debut novel, was a National Book Award finalist. She also wrote the YA novel Pride, a Pride and Prejudice remix, and the middle grade novel My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich. She edited the YA anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

Punching the Air is being recommended to readers who like Jason Reynolds, who made an appearance in the Instagram Live stream, along with fellow YA novelist Nic Stone.

The book is scheduled to come out Sept. 1. The authors said in the chat that they plan to do a book tour, but no news yet on if it will be in-person or virtual.

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Book Review: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say)More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are by Elaine Welteroth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is a divine order, a divine flow to our lives. We don’t need to have all the answers. But our job is to keep on dreaming and trusting enough to put on foot in front of the other.

“More Than Enough” by Elaine Welteroth is a perfect snapshot of a biracial woman who reached such a historic career pinnacle at a young age and is willing to share her climb on the ladder, knowing based on race and upbringing that her climb is unique.

I found myself finding a lot in common with Elaine. I’m a Black woman editor with NorCal roots who had similar dreams but mine took me elsewhere and, like her, there were signs already putting me on a path that I didn’t see then. She starts her story from her childhood, pulling out certain memories that she now knows signaled her destiny. For example, she would make her own magazines for her fake beauty salon in her backyard with her friend. Like a lemonade stand, it made her realize her entrepreneurial and creative spirit.

By the time she gets to college, she’s in a toxic relationship with the boy she followed to Sac State (being from Sacramento luckily a rep from that college told me my grades were too good and I should go to my dream school). She mentioned it on her book tour and in her book that she regretted not applying for her dream school, Stanford, because she was following a boy, a common mistake. But in college, she meets a lifelong mentor, a professor whom she connects with over their similar parentage (Black mother, White father). On a trip, she shares with the professor and another student that she wants to be a magazine editor-in-chief at Essence. They praise her confidence to follow that dream.

When she does earn the Essence internship, the Ebony editor-in-chief she idolizes finally contacts her after she bombarded the editor with messages and asks her to work with her on a photo shoot in Malibu. There, Elaine suggests the model, tennis star Serena Williams, wear a blue bathing suit. She notices her faux pas, but it turns into an assistantship in which she lets go of her dream internship to pursue the opportunity. After being on the fast track, she’s let go at Ebony and worries about being pigeonholed in Black media. But because of her networking, she finds her way into Conde Nast, first at Glamour then at Teen Vogue, with eventually taking the top editor role at the now esteemed teen publication. Once there, she realizes being the first Black woman in charge holds a lot of responsibility, and that means navigating the direction of content to include all teen girls.

What I enjoyed the most about this book is the candidness. She admits to her stumbles, goes into details over those stumbles, and lets the reader know she thought it was the end until her life took another turn. Before every chapter, one of her quotes is highlighted, and it shows how carefully she chose her words to inspire others with her story. The book is on the long side with over 300 pages (like Michelle Obama’s Becoming), but it reads smoothly as you see her growth. Since I am in the same field and from the same area, I felt a strong connection with her and felt inspired by her moves, but it’s a memoir with a positive message that can transcend to women of all ages, but particularly those who are in college and their early 20s when they’re still trying to find their way when it comes to their careers.

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Book Review: ‘A Kind of Freedom’ by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

A Kind of Freedom: A Novel

A Kind of Freedom: A Novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“A Kind of Freedom” by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton is a multigenerational novel that follows a family overcoming and adapting to obstacles specific to their eras. Though the stories of families may be seen as one-dimensional, it still emphasizes how wealth in the African-American community could disappear based on circumstances.

The story starts with Evelyn and her younger sister, Ruby, in 1940s New Orleans as the daughters of one of the only black doctors in the city. Evelyn has her as eye on Renard, who also likes her and has dreams of going to medical school. But her father doesn’t want Evelyn to marry Renard because he doesn’t believe he’ll become a doctor because he lived as an orphan with a friend’s family.

Then the story fast forwards to the early 1980s with Evelyn and Renard’s two daughters Jackie and Sybil. Jackie is unexpectedly raising her son on her own with her husband dealing with a crack cocaine habit working at her parents’ daycare center.

The third part focuses on a post-Katrina New Orleans with Jackie’s son, T.C., all grown up just getting out of jail before his son’s birth.

To most readers, it might seem like a dull tale around a family, but it makes you think about how this black family was on top decades ago only to lose that wealth and status when a white family would’ve more likely stayed on top generations later. It’s a thought-provoking novel.



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Book Review: ‘The Hate U Give’ by Angie Thomas

The Hate U GiveThe Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas looks into the Black Lives Matter movement from a personal viewpoint of a Black teen struggling in two different worlds, and it’s done perfectly.

Starr lives in Garden Heights, the predominantly Black side of the city riddled with crime, but attends Williamson Prep in the ritzy white suburb. While she balances her two personalities in these two different places, she gets caught up at a party where a shooting breaks out. She runs out with her childhood friend, Khalil, and they drive off. A police officer soon stops them for something trivial, and for showing attitude, Khalil gets shot and killed for reaching in his car for his hairbrush. The officer mistook it for a gun. And now Starr as the witness struggles with what comes after.

Starr deals with her nurse mother and ex-con father who owns a grocery store in the neighborhood; her old half-brother Seven who feels he has to take care of his other family under siege by a ganglord; her cop uncle; her white girlfriend Hailey who makes racist comments at school; insecurities around her white boyfriend Chris; and all her friends and neighbors in Garden Heights she feels she’s hurting somehow for not knowing how to approach the situation.

The novel explores a real young Black girl perspective unheard of in the young adult genre, so it was exciting to read that voice. Her voice is raw, so at first it’s wonky to get used to the slang and how she explains her world, but it comes through fast enough to the point where the reader can get devoured by what’s going on. There are a lot of elements, but it shows real-life situations for a teen girl living in two worlds and seeing her friend die at the hands of a cop. Definitely a must-read for being a genre standout and looking forward to how the book will play out on the silver screen.

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