My 2nd booklet of personal essays, Was I Thinking? Digging Deeper into Everyday Racism is just out and available from my distributor. The racial justice publisher Crandall, Dostie and Douglass Books sells it for $8.95 at www.cddbooks.com. I think you will find my new essays thought-provoking. In them, I re-examine my high school textbook; [...]
by Shuhita Bhattacharjee, a graduate student in English at the University of Iowa – “Looking at Our Lives Through the Lens of Race” project
It has been a while since I have wanted to let this out. But it took me five extended plane journeys back and forth to USA, before I could put pen [...]
Looking At Our Lives Through the Lens of Race project
Here is a story by Marianna Sommerfeld, a retired social worker who lives in Cambridge, MA. She wrote it when she was 85 years old.
Looking At Our Lives Through the Lens of Race project
This is Sarah Miller’s story:
The first time I remember realizing there was a negative value in our society attached to being Black was when I was abut ten years old. My family had recently moved to Baltimore and lived in a neighborhood that was pretty much [...]
Looking at Our Lives Through the Lens of Race project
This story is by Aimee Sands, a Boston-based documentary filmmaker: her most recent film is ”What Makes Me White”?
When I was growing up in Westchester County, my grandparents used to drive out from New York City in their gold Impala, pick us up, and drive my sister and me [...]
Looking at our Lives Through the Lens of Race Project
Carol Shilakowsky’s story
Growing Up “White” in America
by Carol Shilakowsky
I grew up in Waltham (MA) in the early 60s to mid 60s: no blacks in school and none that I noticed in town, although there was one man who married an Italian woman and both were dark-skinned, said to be “mulatto,” meaning mixed race.
I came from that [...]
Several years ago, when I sat on the diversity committee of the National Writers Union, we asked anyone attending our caucus to introduce him or herself as either a “person of color,” an LGBT person, a person with a disability — or an ally of one or all of the above.
I happily introduced myself as [...]
Here I am, trying to move past my white-bread mindset, in hope of being able to listen with an open mind to the perspectives of people of color. At the same time, I think of Shakespeare’s “To thine own self be true, and thou canst not be false to any man” and I wonder: how [...]
When I became determined to free myself of group stereotypes based on ignorance, I first tried a shortcut, reading book with titles like Everything You Need to Know About Latino History, Everything You Need to Know About Asian American History, 100 Things Everyone Should Know about African Americans, or The Arab-American Handbook.
As for Native Americans, [...]
