Not Gonna Make it: In Memoriam
My friend Kwame Phillips made this moving video tribute to the Not Gonna to Make It Characters of Color.
*Sniff sniff*
Great song choice.
Tag: characters of color
Talking Back to White Creators: Rachel Rostad’s “To J.K. Rowling, From Cho Chang”
The flip side of the discussion of opening up the speculative fiction genres to more writers of color telling stories about characters of color is the phenomenon of white writers employing characters of color. Such works are not automatically or inherently problematic when done sensitively and skillfully; indeed, the diversification of the worlds of white creators to reflect the real diversity of our own is necessary. Speculative fiction abounds with examples both bad, like the racial allegories of Tolkien‘s Middle Earth, and good, like Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.
Continue reading “Talking Back to White Creators: Rachel Rostad’s “To J.K. Rowling, From Cho Chang””
Diversifying Our Kids’ Genre Bookshelf
As the father of two daughters of color, finding reading material and other media that both reflect back at them and reflect the wider, diverse world of which they are a part is important to me. The discussion around what kind of stories get told about what kind of characters and who gets to tell them is, sadly, not relegated to the realm of speculative fiction literature or literary fiction. The dismal state of affairs in the world of children’s literature was recently put in stark relief by the good people at Lee and Low Books, whose tagline is “About Everyone. For Everyone.”