Racialicious starts us off this week with a thoughtful look at books about black southerners written by white authors, and street-lit written by black writers.
The Washington Monthly takes a look at some disturbing rhetoric that’s come up in the Elena Kagan hearings—not rhetoric about Kagan, but about Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice.
A group of “Gullah/Geechee, descendants of West African slaves who became some of the nation’s earliest black landowners” are fighting to regain ancestral land in Georgia, from which they were displaced in 1942 and which is now a National Wildlife Refuge.
Ta-Nahisi Coates is also looking at his ancestral heritage; not land but genealogy. He’s sharing his finding and his feelings, including his awe and the strangeness of talking to a white man who may well be a relative.
Most migrant farm workers are undocumented, so when there are anti-immigrant complaints about undocumented workers taking jobs that should go to Americans, these are the jobs they’re talking about, right? Colorlines brings us the story of an organization daring complainers to take those jobs—some of the most dangerous and lowest paying jobs in the country.
Lastly, School Library Journal shares a summer reading poster in Toronto that’s causing a ruckus because “the people depicted with darker skin . . . had very little clothing or were barefoot while the paler characters were fully dressed.” What do you think?
