Alton Sterling: A Rumpus Roundup
If the regular mass shootings have been the distraction you needed to forget about America’s ongoing police violence, Baton Rouge, Louisiana would like to remind everyone that, too, is still a problem....
View ArticlePhilando Castile: A Rumpus Roundup
On Wednesday evening, police shot and killed St. Paul Minnesota resident Philando Castile after stopping him for a broken tail light. More than five hundred police shootings have occurred so far this...
View ArticleRoxane Gay on Resisting Numbness
There is a new name to add to this list—Alton B. Sterling, 37, killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, La. It is a bitter reality that there will always be a new name to that list. Black lives...
View ArticleWhat the Cameras Show Us: Ourselves
I am a thirty-two-year-old white, heterosexual, married woman. I walk through the world with privilege. I am not always lucky and my life has not been easy, but I have also never been afraid for my...
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Boyz n the Hood, Chi-Raq, and America 2016
During the introductory scene of John Singleton’s 1991 Boyz n the Hood, ten-year-old Tre Styles (Desi Arnex Heinz II) is walking home from school with his backpack-clad classmates down a suburban...
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The Rumpus Interview with Monica Sok
Monica Sok never stops working. Though we didn’t share any classes together during our overlapping year at the NYU Creative Writing Program, I knew enough about her poems not to miss Year Zero, her...
View ArticleThe Friends of Dorothy Have Something to Say to Kansas
We’re not only not in Kansas anymore, we’re not in any familiar state once a wicked truth-twister starts pushing the buttons and pulling the levers. When our house lands with a loud crash after a...
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Brooke C. Obie
In Brooke C. Obie’s Book of Addis: Cradled Embers, the seventeen-year-old title character is on the run, escaping from slavery. Her enslaver? The first president of a newly formed country. With the...
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