7 posts tagged with racism and history.
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Book: Warriors Don't Cry

Warriors Don't Cry: The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High by Melba Pattillo Beals: What Melba endured as a high school junior integrating Central High in 1957 can only be described as open warfare on African-Americans. The internal strength she exhibited, to get up and go to school every day, is something I can't even imagine. I didn't enjoy reading about this shameful time in US history, but I'm very glad I read the book. It should be required reading in every high school in America, because we clearly have not evolved past this as a society yet.
posted by COD on Mar 17, 2022 - 1 comment

Book: "Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America," by Ijeoma Oluo

"I am not arguing that every white man is mediocre. I do not believe that nay race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity. What I'm saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent."
posted by The corpse in the library on Dec 1, 2020 - 5 comments

Movie: 13th

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb on Jun 15, 2020 - 4 comments

Book: Chop Suey

In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides some history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time. It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine--and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt to them our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences. Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Jan 10, 2020 - 4 comments

Movie: Glory

Robert Gould Shaw leads the U.S. Civil War's first all-black volunteer company, fighting prejudices from both his own Union Army, and the Confederates. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb on Apr 27, 2018 - 2 comments

Book: Stamped from the Beginning

Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. [more inside]
posted by soplerfo on Mar 22, 2017 - 1 comment

Movie: Lone Star

In the Texas border town of Frontera, Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) digs up the past when he finds an old skull in the desert. As he traces the murder of Sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) 40 years earlier, Deeds' investigation points toward his late father, the much-loved Deputy Buddy Deeds. Ignoring warnings not to delve any deeper, Sam rekindles a romance with his high school sweetheart while bringing up old tensions in the town and exposing secrets long put to rest. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb on Feb 4, 2015 - 11 comments

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