Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 8
July 14, 2013
“I say Trayvon, you say Martin”
That was the chant led by Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson during a march up Malcolm X Boulevard towards Ruggles Station tonight. Here are some of the things I heard at the rally beforehand:
“The system cannot fail those it was never meant to defend.”
“We have a lot of politicians here and it’s a fucking photo opportunity.”
“I’m tired and angry and I don’t have a speech prepared.”
“You all think you’re tired now? You didn’t march in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties. We are just getting...
July 3, 2013
The Isis Papers and World War Z
Yeah! I love a good blockbuster! Especially one involving the apocalypse, and don’t they all these days! But I did not love “World War Z.” I thought it was mad racist, and here’s why.
(Disclaimer: I attended Yale during the reign of deconstruction/semiotics/close reading but absorbed pretty much nothing. All that remains of my Ivy League education is a nagging sense that I ought to be able to express myself better in posts like this one.)
Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former U.N. whatever with...
June 17, 2013
Color at last
The cover is up! I’ve kept this website black and white (thanks to Tammy Hart‘s elegant theme) since the start, but it’s time to add a little color. Read about those who made the cover possible here.
June 9, 2013
Dire Reading Series
I have a novelist’s tendency to uncouple from reality whenever possible. Knowing this about myself, I embarked on Twitter with a healthy sense of dread, and sure enough, about eight hundred tweets in, I came to the conclusion that Twitter was enabling my escape from the present moment in a way that couldn’t possibly be good for me in the long run. So I took it off my phone. This is how I came to waiting for the #1 bus in the pouring rain for the third time last Friday, trying to write in my j...
June 2, 2013
Five ways a white author can mess up on race
UPDATE, July 2013: I have “anonymized” this post. Despite my elaborate justifications below, it kept not feeling right to me to put the book’s author on blast. I don’t know his personal journey. Therefore, I’ve redacted the title, author, and some character names.
Today in the Antiracist Book Club, a coming-of-age novel about a gay white kid, “Jamie,” with a black friend, Juice.
First a word about anonymity. In my previous ABC posts, here and here, I disguised the books I was talking about. Th...
