Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 7

Outside help

Today in the Antiracist Book Club, a frank and incredibly helpful essay recently posted on the UK site Media Diversified. Under the title “How to Write Women of Colour and Men of Colour if You are White,” Kayla Ancrum lays it all out in what amounts to a self-help kit for white writers. Seriously, I feel like she should be charging for this (except then I would never have seen it. And, by the way, Media Diversified deserves your support).

“When writing people of color,” Ancrum advises, “produc...

On telling the truth

I’m working on a press release for local papers about my Frugal Bookstore reading (using tips from the Duolit ladies, an incredible source of smart, free advice). A lot has changed for me since I published The One-Way Rain—and not in the way I expected. I knew, of course, that an indie author has to promote herself relentlessly, but I didn’t know for sure how hard this would be for me. Yeah, I had an inkling. But I figured I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. And now I’m standing on it.

E...

The Shukla Test

Unlike most entries in the Antiracist Book Club so far, this isn’t a post about my ideas. This is about the Shukla Test.

I found this article by Nikesh Shukla on the great site Media Diversity UK (“Tackling the Lack of Diversity in the UK Media and the Ubiquity of Whiteness”), which I follow on Twitter. Being a devotee of the Bechdel Test, I had already thought of my own version of the Shukla Test, but TV and fiction writer Nikesh Shukla deserves the credit and signal boost. Here’s the pith of...

Diversion and deflection

Sometimes it’s hard not to think of racism as this covert agency that operates with malign intent and awesome effectiveness, like the bad guys in “Homeland” (check out this corrective to that addictive but repellent show). I guess you could call that agency America. But the concept of intent is a troubling one for me. I’ve said repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere that I am racist. I usually come at it in quick asides, because I’m so afraid of being taken out of context, but it’s very clear...

Memories of the World Series

I followed the Red Sox closely while writing Melly Mockingbird, and I had the great good luck to get interested in the team just a year or two before they won their first World Series in 86 years. Here is my post from LiveJournal after that win. Believe me, this past Wednesday night was nothing in comparison.

Thursday morning, October 28th, 2004, at 2:00 AM.

80 police officers in riot gear, marching in formation

12 police officers in riot helmets, carrying three-foot nightsticks

8 police officer...

Microaggression in fiction

I know this kick-ass woman who helps run a radical youth organization. On Friday I was telling her that I was rushing through a Toni Morrison novel in order to get to the new Stephen King, and she laughed and said, “Why, though?”

I just love Stephen King. Going right from Tar Baby to Doctor Sleep leaves one with no illusion that he is a great writer, but Doctor Sleep offers the visceral pleasure of storytelling in a way that Tar Baby, for me, did not. (Kyle suggested to me that our own racism...

The exoskeleton of whiteness

(Spoilers.) My friend Rockclimber and I splashed out on the IMAX showing of Elysium yesterday. RC doesn’t mind when I scribble notes during a film, fortunately. There was plenty to scribble about in this one. Bloggers younger and more energetic than I have already taken on the obvious white-savior theme of the movie; read Ari Laurel here at Be Young and Shut Up, and Theresa Johnson of The Horn here.

It’s pretty blatant stuff. Matt Damon plays the only white person left in Los Angeles in 2154,...

For Joyce

I stepped out of my house this morning and ran into my neighbor, who looked stricken. He said, “I have a bad feeling Joyce passed last night.” I went to the cafe and cried. When I logged onto my e-mail I found that three people had forwarded me the message your son sent, preparing us, yesterday morning. As the news of your death spread through the neighborhood, two friends told me their hearts were breaking. I texted with two people and spoke to another on the phone. I crossed the street to a...

Letter to Bay Windows

Dear Bay Windows,

As a white lesbian and longtime reader of Bay Windows, I was dismayed by Sue O’Connell’s August 8 editorial, “Sharing our Experience.” Ms. O’Connell equates the struggle of the GLBT community with that of people of color. In a country where black people were enslaved for three hundred years, lynched, and oppressed under Jim Crow, and today are disproportionately poor, in ill health and incarcerated, this comparison is senseless. Ms. O’Connell suggests—despite her disclaimers...

The weight of white supremacy, then and now

When I set out to research something (like baseball for Melly Mockingbird), it always feels important to me to get the latest material. Fiction can be a kind of bluffing, and you want to know your stuff. So when I started to educate myself about racism in America, I wanted very up-to-date books. For instance, I remember reading Living with Racism by Joe Feagin and Melvin Sykes, which was published in 1995, and wondering if things were really still like that. It was a turning point for me to r...