After listening to the podcast, I realize I made an error:
Alice Walker is the author of "The Color Purple".
Toni Morrison is the author of "Beloved".
My apologies to both authors and the audience.
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January 2, 2019 15:21
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Personal Bio and Diversity & Inclusion resource list
Tamara Temple is a self-described "Webologist", tech maven, and deeply interested in software as a craft. As a life-long learner, Tamara has long had an interest in teaching, coaching, and mentoring people in the arts of programming and helping people to learn how to use computers to solve problems, communicate with others, and have a lot of fun.
Tamara works on both back-end development in Ruby on Rails, front-end development in ReactJS and GraphQL, and loves using static site generators such as Jekyll and Gatsby. She loves coaching and mentoring new developers, and loves answering questions of almost any sort.
"I am deeply committed to increasing the diversity of my chosen field by increasing the opportunities for people of colour and people with disabilities, especially. It's important for marginalized and underrepresented people to have wonderful, rewarding, and respectful learning opportunities and experiences."
When not working around computers, Tamara is a mom to two grown daughters, a watercolourist, sketcher, and photographer, and sometime musician.
Mentioned in the podcast, and personally useful to me in my journey of increasing inclusion and diversity:
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"Between the World and Me", Ta-Nehisi Coates, Spiegel & Grau, 2015, ISBN: 0812993543
A very personal book, written from the author to his son, that reveals in incredible depth the pain of raising a black child in America. It provides a visceral portrayal of how African Americans are treated and mistreated, and how far down into the core of being the sense of not being free and able to be deterministic about one's own body exists for people of color today.
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The quote I read from Toni Morrison comes from "A Humanist view as part of Black Studies Center Public Dialogue", part 2, 30-May-1975.
I do not have a link to the article, I obtained the quote from somewhere on the internet, it's pretty easily google-able.
The key point, which is also apparent in Coates' work, is that racisms is debilitating. It is labor enforced upon people of color by white supremacy, which demands explanation for anything the isn't granted through white privilege.
This quote, I really want to emphasize is from 1975, over forty years ago.
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"Fire on the Mountain", by Terry Bisson, Avon Book, 1990, ISBN: 0380753693
This is speculative fiction, set in 1959. The premise is that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry had succeeded during the US Civil War, started by the abolitionists and not the slave owners. It is a remarkable read to Black voices in positions normally held by White voices, and to find one's self in them.
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"Parable of the Sower", Octavia Butler, 1993, ISBN: 0446675504 and "Parable of the Talents", by Octavia Butler, 1998, ISBN: 0446610380 (Earthseed series)
Octavia Estelle Butler was one of the best-known African American science fiction authors, and is regarded as the mother of the current wave of Afrofuturism in science fiction.
The "Earthseed" series is possibly her best known work, and is remarkably precient to our current political climate, and our looming weather climate catastrophe. Finding emapthy with the characters, especially the main character, Lauren Olamina, within a United States that is fracturing from a ruined economy, global climate instability, failure of government at all levels, and the rise of a far-right, fundamentalist, fascist, white supremacist president, who promises to make the country great again, is all too real.
The above are fiction, but there's some really important non-fiction I've read as well
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"White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism", by Robin DiAngelo, Beacon Press, 2018, ISBN: B07638ZFN1
Published July of 2018, the book is a follow-on from her paper "White Fragility", International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3, No 3, 2011, DiAngelo deconstructs the myths white people create about racism, and why those continue to hold systematic racism in place. This book is essential reading for white people.
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"So You Want To Talk About Race", by Ijeoma Olou, Seal Press, 2018, ISBN: 1580056776
Published January of 2018, this book is really helpful in starting and continuing the conversation white people need to have, within themselves as well as out in the world, if they really do want things to change regarding inequities. For me this was another essential book to begin to shape my awareness and discovery.
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"How To Be Black", by Baratunde Thurston, 2012, ISBN: 0062200739
Sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, this book is a perspective from a Black man on how to be a Black man. While I will never actually understand and experience what it's like, this book gives some insight and empathy.
- Nnedi Okorafor, Ph. D. - a prolific author in the aforementioned Afrofuturism style, author of the "Binti" series. Dr. Okorafor's writing is beautiful, and has opened up vistas for me into African culture as it could play out in the far future. She's also the writer on the latest Black Panther graphic novel series, and a new spin-off series, Shuri.
- Nora K. Jemisin - another speculative fiction author, winner of 3 Hugos in a row for the "Broken Earth" triology. An essay she wrote in 2010 is hugely important to understand: Don’t Put My Book in the African American Section
- Saladin Ahmed - an Arab American writer, writer of graphic novels including Black Bolt, Exiles, and the very fabulous book Abbot.
- Tananarive Due - an AA speculative horror fiction writer and instructor, her books are not in a genre know for Black writers, and while not really my personal favorite genre, these are illuminating and expansive into areas where I have had no prior view of African American and African culture
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The Root - part of the gizmodo media group, providing news and commentary for and about PoC
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HashtagCauseAScene podcast - home for Kim Crayton's podcast conversations with people aligned with causing a scene
So twitter.com is a hugely problematic space with gamergaters, brosplainers, fascists, and piling on by far right driven bots. All that notwithstanding, there is a thriving conversation among people of color on twitter. You can find a few on my twitter list.
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