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Last Friday haiku
Thirty days of poetry
Ending with a verse.

Let’s start the week’s links with some history! It turns out that there have been biracial people for a long time, and we’re not just talking homo sapiens of European descent with those of African descent: a recent genetic study found evidence of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals. Pretty cool!

In more recent history, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about a history professor in college who taught him to honestly grapple with history, and not to get into racial myth-building just because we want our ancestors to have been blameless. (Warning: contains adult language.)

A new neurological study looked at how race relates to empathy, and found that how we identify ourselves affects how we react to other people in distress.

Tim Wise provides an exercise in alternate reality: what if the Tea Party protesters were black? (Warning: contains adult language.)

And looking to the future, the Brookings Institution looks at the immigration issue in relation to demographics—as a generational shift in a state where eighty percent of seniors are white, but only forty percent of children.

Perhaps April is
Obviously awesome
Especially for
Trying to write
Rhymes and rhythms
Yesterday, today—Poetry Month!

Only one more week of Poetry Month—enjoy it! (And yes, that means only one more week of reading my terrible attempts at poetry.)

New York Times columnist Charles Blow starts us off with his experience as a black man at a Tea Party rally.

Over at Stuff White People Do, a young woman of color talks about the difficult decisions minorities are forced to make: whether to trade safety and comfort for opportunity.

Ta-Nahisi Coates continues his Confederate History lessons with a reminder that Abraham Lincoln was killed by a White Supremacist.

We know they didn’t really mean it, but Penguin Australia had a truly unfortunate typo in a recent cookbook: a recipe calling for “Salt and freshly ground black people.”

In Poetry Month,
Links to articles on race
Come with a haiku

Ta-Nehisi Coates is thinking about Confederate History Month, and brings us a photo and descriptions of recently-emancipated slaves from an 1864 edition of Harper’s Weekly—and like everything we’ve been reading about the census, it’s a telling glimpse into America’s racial makeup and mixtures: “Rebecca Huger is eleven years old, and was a slave in her father’s house, the special attendant of a girl a little older than herself. To all appearance she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood.”

Stuff White People Do shares the experiences of a woman of color being perceived as a threat by her white neighbors.

The New York Times brings us a fascinating look at diversity on the Supreme Court. It has a really interesting breakdown not just of how the court has been taking baby steps towards diversity, but also how the focus of diversity has shifted over time—from religion, with seemingly token Catholics and Jews; to gender, which we’re still exploring but which has become much less of a big deal; to race; and maybe the next step is sexual orientation.

Lastly, a new study is out, showing that while most children form racial stereotypes young, those with a rare neurological disorder called Williams Syndrome may not form racial bias at all, though they do form gender bias. It’s pretty interesting, and could help scientists figure out how and why we process racial information.

The census, however flawed and necessary it may be, has triggered some great writing and thinking about race and how we define ourselves. From CNN we have two great essays: journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda writes on being Latino and the stories her family has told of their mixed heritage, and author Walter Mosley brings us a poetic look at the 10,000 years of history that led to him.

A different exploration of heritage is being undertaken by two Native American Tribes on Long Island: they’re working with Stony Brook University to recreate their historical languages and hope to teach them to the next generation, bringing the languages back after 200 years of silence.

Zetta Elliott, author of Bird, takes a look at her Canadian origins, her interactions with Canadian publishers, and, of course, race in children’s books—particularly its exoticization, its otherness.

And lastly, Binyavanga Wainaina explores that exoticization in a piece entitled “How to Write about Africa” —actually a list of rules he, and we, wish authors writing cross-culturally would not follow, but that they all too often do. “Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.“

Continuing last week’s conversation on being biracial or multiracial—in a video and link to an essay about census—we have a video looking back to the 2008 presidential campaign and a group of multiracial students at Rutgers:

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The more we talk about race and the more ways we look at race, the better we are able to talk about race and to look at race. So kudos to these young adults for making their experiences known.

Yesterday we posted a video on the frustrations of biracial people being put into little boxes. Taking a very different view is Michele Elam, with a thought-provoking article about the pitfalls of “mark one or more races” on the census.

On her blog, author Shannon Hale takes a look at the lack of girls in children’s movies, the limited roles they play, and an appeal to parents: take your sons to movies with girl heroes. The same goes for books and the same goes for other types of diversity: give the children you know books with heroes who don’t look like them.

Race-Talk has an in-depth look at drug policy and the way it contributes to racial disparity in the U.S. There’s some speculation on why drug policy evolved the way it did, but also a concrete look at its effects.

In the speculative fiction world, Asimov’s has an essay on Western speculative fiction authors writing about non-Western cultures; Rose Fox at Genreville provides a rebuttal and a more nuanced look at the issue. (By the way, have you heard that we’re going to be diversifying MG/YA speculative fiction with the imprint Tu Books? And that we’re really quite excited?)

And on that note, we’re off! Have a good weekend and happy reading!

An eloquent look at being biracial:

I think it’s telling that the frustrating shown in this video is mostly from the tendency for people to be placed into little boxes and defined in rigid, inflexible terms—and that the biracial people speaking here see that tendency as much in the minority community as in the majority.

A look at how black children look at dolls—light and dark—in the 1940s and today.

There has been improvement, and that’s great. But what’s really telling is the difference between the boys and the girls; the boys universally look at the black and white dolls as equally pretty, but the girls were split, many of them preferring the white doll. This small study isn’t enough to tell us why the difference exists, but it’s easy to speculate that girls feel more pressure in regard to appearance and prettiness, and are therefore more aware of racial stereotypes when it comes to beauty. Girls of color face sexism as well as racism, and the combination can be particularly painful.