It was an incorrect idea when first posited and looks absurd in this moment, given the events of this year: we were never living in a post-racial America. The entire concept was meant as misdirection, put forth by those in this country who would choose to halt progress by announcing that there was no more inequity to address. “We’ve conceded enough privilege,” was the actual message lying beneath “post-racial,” and as we’ve seen in this election, that message has morphed from subtext to a full-throated proclamation.
We are headed for a strange time, one in which writing will be crucial, even beyond all the journalistic handwringing about a free press in peril. We need other writers—novelists, poets, essayists, the kinds making literature—to confront this era head on. And we need this literature to reach the places it hasn’t reached in a very long time; the hardest conversations people in this country must have are with other people we don’t ordinarily converse with. Literature, as has always been the case, must be at the forefront of bridging that divide.
Some Rain Taxi’s reviews related to race:
Review by Spencer Dew of Big Enough to be Inconsistent by George Fredrickson (Summer 2008, Online)
Review by Scott F. Parker of From Jim Crow to Jay-Z by Miles White (Spring 2012, Online)
Review by Edward A. Dougherty of Admit One by Martha Collins (Fall 2016, Online)
There are a lot of countries we’re being asked to think about this summer, countries that become conceptualized in terms of the distilled stances each presidential candidate takes toward them. Thinking of the world map purely in terms of sound bites related to an election is obviously reductive and shallow, but that can be hard to notice, in the moment; a better way to identify the lack of depth to this thinking would be to remember the countries that have faded from our arbitrary spotlight, despite not really straying from whatever it was that grabbed American attention in the first place. And so I want to ask: when was the last time you heard news coverage on China?
There was a time when the superhero story felt grandiose: some otherwise-normal human with an extraordinary power we’d never yet imagined, grappling with the implications of this power while also stopping some form of Evil just in the nick of time. This time, I think, has passed. We can imagine all the “powers,” and we’ve heard the stories so many times that they rarely feel new. Somehow, what once existed on the far edges of our entertainment imaginations has come to feel quaint. So what is there still for us to find, in these stories we’ve now heard before?
There is not a single person who thinks this is working—“this” being the whole experiment, the American Concept, the abstract set of ideals that when put into practice end up looking far different than anyone imagined. When it comes the United States, who’s happy, right now? The answer is close to no one, and the rub of it is that the various reasons why this is true either contradict themselves or feel so impossibly entrenched one cannot imagine them being solved.
You are being watched. As recently as a few years ago, sentiment like this would sound like the cliché of someone suffering from paranoia. As of now, though, it’s frankly reasonable to point out that unless you really are hiding in isolation, someone is “looking” at you.
Islam is a religion of peace. You’ve heard this idea before, and you’ve probably heard it said exactly like that. The reason these words are so familiar in the cultural conversation is because they so often need repeating in the face of bigotry; too often, Islam finds itself in the crosshairs of xenophobic scapegoating. More than any other group in 21st-century America, ordinary Muslim Americans get characterized by the terrible acts of extremists who inhabit their ideology.
Scandinavia isn’t that big. Its defining feature might be that it’s a Separate Entity, in terms of its geography, culture, and presence on the global political stage. They speak their own languages, three of the four countries have their own currency, and they’re not even that popular of tourist destinations, when compared to locales throughout the rest of Europe and the world. But to Americans, particularly the ones making decisions about how the country is run, Scandinavia has a strange theoretical presence as either a utopia or a moral worst-case scenario.
There is nothing you know as much about as your own body. To say you “know about it” is actually too much distance between you and it; we are our bodies, no matter how separate or at odds with them we sometimes feel. It’s interesting, then, how the body remains one of the great puzzles in all of human thought and science. Medicine, theology, literature, biology, sociology, even math: there are people in every field who have made a lifetime out of just trying to figure out what in the world we actually are, how we’re put together, and why. Think about it: isn’t this just a complicated version of staring at a mirror?