A Los Angeles Times reporter recently asked me and a couple of others which two books or essays students should read regarding race and racism in the Ferguson era. Whittling it down to only two was almost impossible, but I managed–it was an interesting exercise. I pared it down to James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation and a Harper’s Magazine interview between Cornel West and Jorge Klor de Alva. You can read more about these two texts in the L.A. Times article that came out yesterday.
Charleston and Beyond
Hua Hsu, “The Trouble with ‘White People'” in The New Yorker
A spot-on comment from Hua Hsu in The New Yorker:
“The scenes of American injustice that we see on a regular basis are not failures of people being insufficiently nice to one another. They are about the legacies and structures that hem in our choices, that define the circumference of our imaginations, that trigger our personal gut reaction to the very word ‘dream.’ They are about those whom the truth cannot set free. We can control and harness our feelings. I have no idea how to destroy and rebuild our institutions.”
Read the full commentary here.
Racial Diversity and its Limits: What One Experience with Asian American Students Might Tell Us About Teaching Race
The following was posted recently on the Race Matters in the Classroom Blog of the Wabash Center.
I was horrified to discover that Dylann Roof regarded Asians as inherently racist and thus possible allies to white supremacist causes. That opinion received little media attention, except for spotty clusters throughout social networking sites. And while Roof’s assessment of Asians is nothing short of galling, I also found them disquieting; it was the words of a white supremacist mad man that had uncomfortably recalled a specific set of experiences in my course “Race, Politics, and Theology.” Read more…
My So-Called Race 