Category: Blog

On a freezing, overcast March day, the writer Jesmyn Ward made her first foray to Cleveland.  She barely smiled as she stood behind a lectern in brown leather boots, red corduroy pants and a gray sweater set. Yet several in her audience at Cleveland Public Library murmured that the piercing, prepared remarks Ward read should be published immediately. Others were visibly moved and brimming with questions.

Ward, 36, who won a National Book Award for her second novel, “Salvage the Bones,” spent the morning with Cleveland students from Glenville High School and the afternoon exploring the question of who is allowed to speak: “We all feel inadequate when faced with a blank page, an empty canvas or a silent instrument.  We must battle self-doubt or negative introspection with every sentence, every punctuation mark.”

Growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, Jesmyn wore hand-me-down clothes and ate meals stretched by food stamps. She envied classmates who could buy Scholastic books, even as she walked to the library, gravitating toward headstrong protagonists:  Mary in “My Secret Garden” and Cassie in “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” and Claudia in “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”

“Their environments were other worlds where I hid from the heat or my mother or my father or some other grown-up in my life,” Ward remembered.  When her father lost his job at the local glass factory, her family moved in with Ward’s maternal grandmother.  Fourteen people wedged into the house in coastal DeLisle, Mississippi—Jesmyn, her parents, two sisters and a brother; a cousin; her grandmother’s four sons and three daughters; plus the matriarch herself: “It was the first and only time I lived with so many people I loved.”

Ward’s fiction and her arresting 2013 memoir, “Men We Reaped,” beckons readers into this community. The title comes from Harriet Tubman: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead men we reaped.”

The memoir centers on the October 2000 killing of Ward’s teenage brother Joshua by a drunk driver, and the violent, early deaths of four other young black men in their circle.  Now a professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama, Ward said she keeps returning to the site of her story — despite the poverty, racism and lingering damage from Hurricane Katrina, whose wrath Ward makes memorable in “Salvage the Bones.”

An active blogger and Twitter user, Ward identifies with communities on the margins. When a Cleveland reader – speaking for her book club — asked repeatedly if Ward was trying to foment social change, the author mildly eschewed the grandiose: “I hope that it changes the way readers think about people like me. If I can affect one reader, then by word-of-mouth, that makes a change over time.”

“The word ‘salvage’ is so close to ‘savage’,” Ward told her listeners. “It connotes resilience, fierceness and courage.”  She describes her novel’s pregnant, teenage narrator, Esch Batiste, brushing off the ants and standing up after the hurricane, as the only thing she could do. “This is savage – you make a future from it, you tell your story, you survive.”

Ward said that when Hurricane Katrina cornered her own family, she swam to escape alongside her pregnant sister. The Wards sheltered in a tractor in an open field during a Level Five hurricane, she said, while a white farm family refused to take them in.

The Cleveland audience listened intently. One man called Ward’s voice “a smooth, velvet instrument.” One woman compared her writing to that of Edwidge Danticat, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book award in 2005 for her novel “The Dew Breaker.”  (Ward allowed that she had loved Danticat’s work since the novel “Krik? Krak.” ) A professor from Kent State University said she had added Ward to her syllabus.

Ward stressed the necessity of discipline and craft; she said her characters Skeeter and China (a pit bull) came out of a writing exercise during her MFA years at the University of Michigan. Still, Ward said, “my mother sometimes thinks I should return to school and study nursing. She is suspicious of writing.” Ward said her first stabs were stilted attempts to write about cellos and lives she didn’t know.  “I was young and black and poor and a girl and I didn’t believe there was anything about my life worth exploring.”

She broke that barrier with a college entrance essay. It opened the door to Stanford.  Like all of Ward’s work, it said “We are here. This is what life is like for us. Hear us.”

For the first time, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards will sponsor a movie at the Cleveland International Film Festival: the documentary, “Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.” It will screen three times this month.

Directed by long-time Alice Walker collaborator Pratibha Parmar, the film weaves interviews, readings and archival footage to explore the themes of Walker’s literary work and advocacy. At age 70, Walker is best known for writing The Color Purple, 1982’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It generated enormous controversy, and an influential film, which the documentary explores. Also central is Walker’s lifelong activism – stretching from voter registration drives in the 1960s to championing women’s rights in the present-day. Collaborators and critics and Walker herself speak to the merits of her political life. Watch the trailer below:

“Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth” will screen on three successive days: March 26 at 4:15 p.m., March 27 at 9:30 a.m. in Tower City, and March 28, at 7:00 p.m. at the Shaker Square Cinema. Festival attendees can take advantage of the Cleveland Foundation’s discount code in honor of its centennial (CLE100) and save $2 on the purchase of every ticket to every film throughout the festival. Purchase tickets here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Americanah” took the top prize for fiction at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Awards .

Karen Long, Anisfield-Wolf manager and judge for the NBCC, praised Adichie’s latest: “Americanah”—it should be stressed—doesn’t reprimand. The writing glints; minor characters flair and spark.”

In a recent HuffPost Live interview, Adichie asserted that “Americanah” was the book she wanted to write for her own personal satisfaction:

“I felt almost liberated,” she remarked. “This is the novel where I’m completely having fun and I’m free. I’m not burdened by a sense of duty of responsibility. I was just having fun. With Half of a Yellow Sun, I felt this weight of responsibility. I knew many people would read the novel not as fiction, but as history….With Americanah, there was no burden.”

On the eve of the NBCC awards, Adichie stopped by the Bruce Lehrer Show to discuss the themes of race and identity woven throughout Americanah. Listen to the interview in its entirety below:

Occasionally, a white writer will turn to Mat Johnson, the novelist who created the much-praised “Pym” and “Hunting in Harlem,” with a manuscript and a plea to help avoid a racial blunder.

“My colleagues will say, ‘I have a black character, a maid, and I don’t want her to talk like a Harvard professor, but I don’t want her to sound like Stepin Fetchit either,’ ” Johnson told a packed audience in Seattle. “I’m both sympathetic and put off by these requests.”

Johnson, who runs the creative writing program at the University of Houston, described this predicament at the annual convention of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Randa Jarrar, the author of the novel “A Map of Home,” shared a similar experience:

“I just got an email two days ago from a friend who said, ‘I have a scene in my novel, coming out from a major publishing house, in which a couple of Arab women are sitting around a pool. Can they wear swimsuits?’ That’s wrong. That’s focusing on difference, and a writer shouldn’t do that.”

Jarrar and Johnson led a lively panel called “How Far, Imagination: Writing Characters of another Race in Fiction.” The speakers weren’t interested in the reductive, polarized debate – I’m free to write whatever I want vs. Ooooh, one should never transgress identity boundaries. Instead, the panelists steered the discussion toward nuance.

“I inhabit so many identities,” Jarrar said. “I’m Arab-American, Palestinian, queer, a single parent. I’m fat. If you know who you are, it works to improve writing characters in general.”

Panelist Susan Ito focused on the classic example from 1997: “Memoirs of a Geisha” by the white American writer Arthur Golden. Mineko Iwasaki, the Japanese woman interviewed for the book, sued Golden, and the two parties eventually settled out of court. “Did that book succeed or fail?” Ito asked. “Commercially, it was spectacularly successful. And I still know people who say it is their favorite book. If we are asking about writing across race, we need to ask what is success, and by what measure?”

Fiction writer Patricia Engel said her own work improves exponentially with research: “Relying strictly on my imagination, that writing was flat and aimless.” She suggested that aspiring writers try, as an exercise, to write a character outside their own experience, do the research and show themselves, too, in the work.

Johnson declared he would steal that idea. “What people think of as political concerns in fiction are actually artistic concerns: how to make a character a full and living human being.”

But good intentions can crater fast. In Johnson’s first workshop earning an MFA at Columbia University, he remembered that “a white woman wrote a black character and the workshop ended with the writer in tears and the black students furious.”

Now a professor, Johnson stressed that he wants to be the first to encourage students to examine their motives. “It’s particularly difficult for a white writer to write black, Latino, Asian characters. There are centuries of manipulating the images of people of color. White writers have to deal with that – have to ask how they are negotiating the history of stereotypes.”

The panelist agreed that a good place to start is the 1992 documentary “Color Adjustment” by filmmaker Marlon Riggs. It looks at race through the lens of prime time.

Andrew Solomon dedicated a chapter of his Anisfield-Wolf winning Far from the Tree on families whose children have committed serious crimes. He interviewed parents of gang leaders, killers and sex offenders, examining the place of the family during and after the child’s stint in prison. In the only interview published with the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters in 1999’s Columbine massacre, Solomon showed the complexity of their lives: “I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born,” Sue Klebold says of her son. “But I believe it would not have been better for me.”

Because of this book, Peter Lanza reached out to Solomon to tell his side.  Lanza is the father of Adam Lanza, the killer of 26 elementary school children, his mother and himself in Newtown, Conn. This led to Solomon interviewing the father for seven sessions, which resulted in a New Yorker article that made national news.  The senior Lanza discusses his son, the massacre and its aftermath.  He believes that Adam’s autism masked an underlying emotional disorder, one that went undetected by the numerous psychologists and psychiatrists who examined Adam.

For Anisfield-Wolf fans in Ohio, there are still tickets available to his March 18 appearance in Cleveland for the Cuyahoga County Library’s Writers Center Stage series.

Few writers have made the kind of spectacular, multimedia splash onto the literary scene the way James McBride has.

McBride, 56, first attracted attention in 1996, for his memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. It sat atop the New York Times bestsellers list for two years, selling more than two million copies and winning an Anisfield-Wolf award for nonfiction. His first novel, 2002’s The Miracle of St. Anna, enjoyed a movie adaptation from director Spike Lee, for which McBride adapted the screenplay.

But Song Yet Sung received a quieter reception in 2008. “Only eight people read it, and I have 11 brothers and sisters so that’s saying something,” he quipped at his recent appearance at the Hudson Library & Historical Society in Ohio.

It’s safe to say McBride has rebounded nicely with The Good Lord Bird. A picaresque story built around abolitionist John Brown, the story is told through the eyes of runaway slave Henry Shackleford, a boy passing as a girl. It won the 2013 National Book Award in November; McBride was so surprised he carried his dinner napkin up to the lectern, where he had to improvise an acceptance speech.

“In jazz, lots of people play the same songs,” McBride told the Daily Beast. “But it’s the way you play it is what distinguishes you from the next man or woman who plays it.”

Indeed, music informs McBride’s writing, and vice versa. An accomplished tenor saxophonist, McBride has traveled with jazz legend Jimmy Scott and composed songs for Anita Baker. For his last two books, McBride has married the literary with the musical on tour with what is now the Good Lord Bird band. The quintet performed funky, jazz-infused renditions of enduring gospel hymns, often packing auditoriums and driving audience members to their feet. Others sway in their seats.

Watch this clip of the band’s performance at the New York Public Library.

McBride, who earned a conservatory degree at Oberlin College in 1979, noted the connection he felt with John Brown, who worked for a time at Oberlin, and whose father was a trustee.

“History depends on who’s telling it — and why,” he said. The novel “seemed a way to thrust Brown into the reality of now.”

Fresh off a feature on Beyonce’s secret album, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stopped by HuffPost Live to talk about how her latest work, Americanah, fits in her literary career and how she found comfort in breaking the rules.

Watch as Adichie, a 2007 Anisfield-Wolf award winner, discusses embracing her fashion sense as a “serious writer,” the importance of race and class in feminism, and more.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-why-i-didnt-wear-high-heels_n_5b56104be4b004fe162fa7d2

A play about the realities of black students at Harvard University debuts Friday at the Black Arts Festival on the Harvard campus. Hosted by various multicultural campus organizations, the “I, Too, Am Harvard” performance focuses on the daily microaggressions black students face at the predominately white university. (The most recent university data puts the black student population at 5.2 percent of the 21,000-plus student body.)

“As far back as I could remember, I’ve always been pretty cognizant of race,” one student remarked in the 5-minute promo video. “But this past semester was uncomfortable because it was the first time in a long time that I felt the burden of being black in the classroom and being black walking around Harvard’s campus…This year, I just felt like ‘the other.'”

The corresponding #ITooAmHarvard campaign has launched on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to further the conversation.

Students at Harvard aren’t the only ones using social media to spread their message of isolation and frustration. In the fall of 2013, the Black Student Union at the University of Michigan flooded Twitter with the #BBUM hashtag (which stands for “being black at University of Michigan”). Three months later, they organized a “Speak Out” protest that drew more than 1,000 attendees on campus. Earlier this year, UCLA junior Sy Stokes’ spoken word video went viral with the assertion that his school has more NCAA championships than black male freshmen.

What do you make of these movements? Is social media a strong medium for drawing attention to these matters?

At 38, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior correspondent for The Atlantic’s online property, has become one of the nation’s foremost writers on race and culture. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Coates (whose first name is pronounced Tah-Nuh-Hah-See) found himself on stage at the Cleveland Public Library before a large, diverse crowd that included students from the all-male Ginn Academy, a Cleveland public high school. The boys created a crimson line in the audience in their signature red blazers.

Despite the formal setting, Coates was quick to share his humble beginnings. Born in West Baltimore, he came of age in “the era where black boys died,” he said. Drugs and violence decimated entire communities, but Coates said his saving grace was his parents’ strict guidance. His father, Paul Coates, was a former Black Panther who encouraged his seven children to immerse themselves in African-American history. His father ran an independent publishing house, Black Classic Press, out of their basement, while his mother, Cheryl, worked as the breadwinner for many years.

In conversation on stage with Plain Dealer Book Editor Joanna Connors, Coates described a young Ta-Nehisi as bright but unable to focus in school or earn passing grades. But in a junior-level English class — which he was repeating his senior year — he came across a passage in Macbeth that worked as revelation: words, put in the right order, could be beautiful. He found the poetry of Shakespeare reminded him of his favorite lyricist, Rakim. Admitted to Howard University, he reveled in Zora Neale Hurston’s words. “She wrote about black people as I knew black people,” he said.

A series of writing gigs at The Village Voice and Time Magazine led him to The Atlantic. Coates rules his corner of the site like an unabashed totalitarian, seeing his role as a blogger as parallel to a dinner party host. He deletes comments he sees as adding nothing to the conversation and engages those that give him something to chew on. He is not afraid to be schooled, and readily admits he is nothing if not “insanely curious.”

At the tail end of 2012, Coates devoured all 600-plus pages of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and began 2013 with a pointed critique of American politics, concluding that “America does not really want a black middle class.”

“America says to its citizens, ‘Play by the rules, and you will enjoy the right to compete,'” Coates wrote. “The black migrants did play by the rules, but they did not enjoy the right to compete. Black people have been repeatedly been victimized by the half-assed social contract.”

The intersection of injustice and policy fuels many a blog post. Over the past few weeks, Coates has dedicated the majority of his space to understanding the outcome of the jury verdict given Michael Dunn, the 47-year-old white man who shot into a car outside a Florida convenience store. Inside the vehicle were four unarmed teenage black boys; Dunn killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis.

Speaking on Davis and Trayvon Martin, Coates said, “They were robbed of the right to experience the world, to allow the world to change them. They are frozen in time in their boyhood.”

As the father of a 13-year-old son, Coates said these incidents haunt him. Still, he doesn’t believe he is as strict a parent as his own father. He explored their dynamic in his debut book, 2009’s The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, and appeared to still be coming to terms with the current state of their relationship.

“I work hard to make my son accountable for his own dreams,” Coates said. “He talks about all these goals where he wants to play soccer for a German club or go work at Google. I’m telling him, yeah, that’s great, but are you practicing? Did you do your math homework? Being smart and talented is useless without hard work.”

Retha Powers, the editor of the magnificent and addictive new “Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations,” has a handful of all-time favorite sayings, or “micro-histories,” as she calls them. One is from the author of the foreword to her book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? So I’m divided. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time — but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried catfish.

Powers, a life-long New Yorker, likes sushi better than catfish, but she revels in Gates’ point. She described the thrill when he accepted her invitation to write the foreword, transmitted in an email Gates sent from a plane. The two had not met.

“His work has been tremendously important to me,” Powers said over coffee near her home in Harlem. “I’m not an academic and, in a lot of ways, Dr. Gates mentored me from afar – in his far-reaching, accessible writing and his insistence on embracing Africa. He is not afraid of being an intellectual.”

In an interesting twist, both Powers and Gates are finalists for the NAACP Image prize in nonfiction, Gates for his PBS companion book, “The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.” The Harvard University professor and chair of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards praised Powers, noting that she stands in a proud tradition: the first collection of black quotations published in 1898.

“In following them, Retha Powers both honors their work and reaffirms something essential about black culture: quoting or ‘sampling’ are both versions of the larger African American language practice of signifying,” Gates writes.

And so, “Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations” spans 5,000 years and samples politicians and poets, artists and visionaries from the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and ancient Egypt. It moves chronologically, and veers from Ma Rainey to Lionel Richie, from Frederick Douglass to Michelle Obama, from Derek Walcott to Kanye West, from Mary McLeod Bethune to Mayor Marion Barry. The text is also rich in Anisfield-Wolf winners.

Writing in the New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised it as “a necessary and preternaturally lively new reference book,” adding that “it also possesses something no other book of quotations quite does: a potent and sweeping narrative arc. It is possible to consume this book avidly from end to end.”

Powers hoped to evoke that response. She wanted these quick bites to excite the palates of readers to seek out a speaker or a period of history, to discover a new book, or thrill to the way Phillis Wheatley – the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry – and Rita Dove are in conversation across the centuries.

“There are a lot of years between Phillis Wheatley and Rita Dove but there are interesting parallels too,” Powers said. “Both are very concerned about an emotional reality, about place and principles. And both are black women writing about things that aren’t domestic.”

One difference, circa 1772, that Gates observes: “Wheatley had to submit to examination by the leading lights of Boston to ascertain that the poems she had written were not mere quotations of others’ work but her own original creations, the creation of a fellow human being.”

Powers includes much from music, and the both the book and the English language are richer for it. Nor does she flinch from the infamous: Colin Powell’s “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons,” and Marion Barry’s “Bitch set me up.” Her own taste runs to Zora Neale Hurston and other contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, an affection she strove to discipline with balance and tough editing.

At 44, Powers is quite mindful that the verdicts of history shift. She peppers her own conversation with quotes: “Stanley Crouch said, ‘If there is an intellectual highway, there is also an intellectual subway.’” This book, she said, is meant to be “browse-able, fun, delightful and surprising.” Who doesn’t perk up to learn – or remember — that Shirley Chisholm’s 1967 presidential campaign slogan was “Unbought and Unbossed”?

For an editor whose purse still contains stray scraps of “micro-histories,” Powers is excited that “Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Black Quotations” is being adapted into an app. She is particular fond of a remark by Anna Julia Cooper, born in 1858: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

Powers also cottons to James Baldwin’s 1976 observation: “Identify would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of self; in which case, it is best that the garment be loose.”

As she awaits word on the NAACP Image prize, for which she will travel to Los Angeles, Powers might want to flip her book to a passage from “Beloved,” the novel by Anisfield-Wolf winner Toni Morrison: “Here . . . in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh . . . You got to love it, you! . . . Love your heart. For this is the prize.”

Philosophy Professor David Livingstone Smith kicked off the University of New England’s 2014 diversity lecture series with a talk on why “race” is a destructive concept.

The 2012 Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction award winner for “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others” stated his mission at the top: “I wish to liberate you. I do not think I will succeed, but I hope I will raise questions about certain beliefs you take for granted.”

Smith presented his audience with a slide of four individuals with light skin and typical European facial features. He then asked the audience if they could determine which two were, in fact, African-American. It proved puzzling for those assembled. (See the slide here.)

“Virtually every genocide that I know enough about has been a racialized genocide,” Smith told his listeners on the Maine campus. “The notion of race gets us into a lot of trouble.”

Smith, who has taught philosophy at the university since 2000, is also the co-founder of The Human Nature Project, which explores evolutionary biology and human nature. He is the author of seven books, including Less Than Human, a centerpiece text in several college classes, including the Anisfield-Wolf course at Case Western Reserve University.

Watch his entire talk below on the “race delusion” and share your thoughts:

Anti-racism activist Tim Wise joked that he was on his third visit to the University of Akron campus in the past 15 years and was pleased to see the audience increase each time.

His 2005 memoir, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, still sells briskly. It also still fuels debate on the soundness of a white man’s prominence in the anti-racism movement, endorsements by Angela Davis and Cornel West notwithstanding.  And White’s public speaking habit of shifting into “white” voice to contrast with his “black” voice can be cringe-inducing.

Still, if there were critics tucked into the Akron crowd of 500 at E.J. Thomas Hall, they stayed quiet. Several African-Americans nodded vigorously as Wise laid out his points. “You can’t solve social problems with silence,” he argued. “I invite white folks to have the difficult conversations.”

Structural inequity should bother everyone, Wise said, and as the country’s demographics shift toward majority-minority, equality is more important than ever. “What binds us as Americans?” Wise asked the crowd. “It’s the myth of meritocracy — that anyone can make it if you try hard enough.”

Wise didn’t hesitate in calling such respondents out. “They were delusional,” he said, voice rising. “But there wasn’t any penalty for being ignorant of black and brown issues. It’s not on the test. Whatever white folks think is important, black people have to learn that. That will damn sure be on the test. White folks write the test. That’s the luxury of being the norm.”

Filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley knew he wanted to make a film on Rita Dove. So the director of documentaries on former NAACP chairman Julian Bond and revolutionary Che Guevara decided to finance the project out of his own pockets.

Indeed, music is her center. The accomplished musician, whose talents extend to the viola da gamba (related to the cello), finds that both music and poetry “scratch the same itch.” Dove’s connection to music lead to the little-known story of African-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower, a protege of Ludwig van Beethoven. He inspired her 2009 book, “Sonata Mulattica.” 

Wither the best book list? Inherently inane and crazy-making, these are also undeniably good conversation starters.

Amazon has posted the latest iteration: its best “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.” It includes two Anisfield-Wolf prize novels: Junot Diaz‘ “The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” as well as James McBride’s memoir “The Color of Water.” Also on the list is the immortal “Invisible Man” from Ralph Ellison, which won an Anisfield-Wolf Landmark Achievement, and books by Anisfield-Wolf recipients Edwidge Danticat and Louise Erdrich.

Of course, it is strange to see “Kitchen Confidential” make the cut, and the bizarre assertion that “Portnoy’s Complaint” is Philip “Roth at his finest.” The Amazon list tilts toward best-sellers, rather than an author’s best work.

Working another vein is the redouble Cosmopolitan Magazine, which has offered its list of the 10 best books to read after a breakup. Junot Diaz makes this list, too, this time for “This is How You Lose Her,” his sexy, harrowing short story collection. Surprisingly, he is joined by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc for her gold-standard of domestic reporting, “Random Family.” Cosmo editors give the somewhat spurious reason that the book is an absorbing distraction. May we add: and much more.

When 13-year-old Idris Brewster, subject of the thought-provoking documentary “American Promise,” is invited to a classmate’s bat mitzvah, he says he hasn’t much interest. None of the girls ever want to dance with him, and he has a good idea why.

“I bet if I was white, I’d be better off,” he says plainly.

His parents, filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, are sitting off camera. They let the moment land.

Such incidents occur often in the two-hour film, which follows Idris and his best friend Seun Summers for 13 years at The Dalton School, a prestigious college preparatory institution in Manhattan. The documentary premiered on PBS in February and is available to viewers on the PBS website until March 6, 2014. Then it goes on sale.

Since it made the rounds at last year’s film festivals (winning a jury prize at Sundance), American Promise has sparked a new round of conversation about black male educational achievement. The numbers are sobering. Black children are more likely to have ineffective teachers and fewer educational resources, which may partly explain why black males are also twice as likely to drop out.

Brewster and Stephenson said their motives were simple. “We were confident that [attending Dalton] would set them on a course for academic success and we wanted to capture it all on film,” they write in their filmmaker’s statement. “This personal experience pushed us to expose the impact of the unique social and emotional needs of black boys on their academic performance.”

Serving a dual role as parents and filmmakers, Idris’ parents demand nothing but excellence from him and their younger son, Miles. They have no trouble expressing their exasperation when Idris doesn’t live up to expectations. After a particularly rough semester, Idris’ parents develop a spreadsheet to better manage Idris’ time. “Every hour of the day is accounted for,” Joe says.

Life at Dalton, which sends 30 percent of its graduates to Ivy League colleges, challenges all of its students, but those problems are magnified for African-American males. Dalton administrators talk on camera about how often black boys falter at the school, but suggest few solutions. The pattern is evident with Idris and Seun. They start out in kindergarten with a thirst for knowledge, but by sixth grade things are souring.

Parents of other black boys at Dalton express discomfort with the changes they see in their sons. And they wonder whether the sacrifice is worth it. Tuition runs $25,000 and some parents spend an addition $30,000 per year on tutors. They ask how their sons can compete.

The pressure is palpable as the boys as grow into young men. Seun is diagnosed with dyslexia and his parents hire a tutor to help him keep up. But the demands increase even as Seun—very bright and capable, according to his teachers—falls further behind. He transfers to a public school where the student body is predominately African-American. He begins to feel more comfortable, and this seems reflected in his work.

Idris remains at Dalton, where he is pushed (by his parents and teachers) beyond his perceived limitations. As he matures, his struggles with identity become more apparent. He learns the art of “code switching” — changing language, tone and posture as his company changes.

Brewster and Stephenson put together a companion book, Promises Kept, which expands on the film and offers parents and educators with resources to help close the achievement gap.

“Essentially, how well students do is how well we do as a nation,” Stephenson said. “The two are interlinked and intertwined. If we really want to compete at a level that makes sense to maintain, not only our status but our community and our values in this country, we have to take care of all of our children.”

In her influential best-seller, “The New Jim Crow,” law professor Michelle Alexander dissects the devastating racial consequences of “locking up and locking away” more than two million American citizens. And in her frequent public appearances, Alexander elaborates on the paradox of her subtitle: “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

She drew a standing ovation on a recent, frigid night at Baldwin Wallace University near Cleveland. Speaking in a steady, clear voice, the Ohio State University professor delivered a portrait of contemporary racism difficult to hear: The U.S. prison population quadrupled in the last 30 years, fueled, Alexander argues, by a war on drugs applied disproportionately in communities of color.  There are more American prisoners now than there were slaves in 1850 — before the Civil War. And black children now have less chance of being raised by two parents than black children born into slavery, a system notorious for dismantling families.

“We all know large numbers of black men are locked away in cages,” she told more than 800 listeners, some packed into an overflow room.  “And we know people released from prison face a lifetime of discrimination, scorn and exclusion.”  She listed some of the hundreds of work-required licenses barred for people with felonies — including in some states, a barber’s license.

“I now believe mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow,” said Alexander, 46, dressed plainly in a gray jacket, brown blouse and brown slacks.  “People sometimes react with shock: What about Barack Obama? What about Oprah Winfrey?  What about Colin Powell?”

The comedian Steve Colbert did, asking, with faux severity: “Why did not black people just say no?”

Alexander told him that solid research shows African Americans use illegal drugs at the same rates as other races, but are much more frequently prosecuted.  She would like the country to return to its 1970s levels of incarceration, legalize marijuana, and end the war on drugs.

The American people twice elected a black president — a fact that Alexander believes helps mask a new system of racial caste, where nobody drinks at a segregating water fountain, but jobs, housing and food stamps are all blocked from those trying to re-enter society from prison.  Poor communities are saddled with decrepit schools, while gleaming, high-tech prisons operate for profit.  She cited the research of William Julius Wilson: in the 1970s, 70 percent of African-Americans in cities held blue-collar jobs; today the figure is 28 percent.

“The one thing that poor folk of color can ask for and get are police and prisons,” she said dryly.  The daughter of the late John and Sandra Alexander, a senior vice president for ComNet Marketing group in Medford, Oregon, Michelle graduated from Vanderbilt and Stanford universities, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.  Her sister, Leslie Alexander, is a professor of African American studies at Ohio State University.  Her husband, Carter Mitchell Stewart, is a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio.

Even as a civil rights lawyer, Alexander said she awoke to the new Jim Crow slowly, reluctantly: “There was a time when I rejected those comparisons out of hand as exaggerated and unproductive.”

No more.  Her book won an NAACP Image award in 2011, and has been firing conversations in book clubs, churches and universities since it arrived in paperback.  Some students at Baldwin Wallace took careful notes; others scrolled their smart phones.  Partisans of the Communist Party sold newspapers at the door, and one man who identified himself as a lifelong member asked Alexander to declare her allegiances.

“I am someone who believes in justice,” she said carefully. “I am for basic human rights and economic justice for all. I resist labels and I am not going to assign one to myself.”

Her advice to students: “Think about movement building and not simply policy reform.” She pointed to the success of gay marriage advocates who bent public opinion: “Politicians have no choice but to respond.”

Ask Nichelle Gainer why she decided to create Vintage Black Glamour, and her answer is simple: She saw a need.

As a writer, Gainer learned to research, which often led to beautiful historic photographs of African-American artists, actors and political figures, all hidden away in the corners and file cabinets of libraries and academic institutions. Why haven’t more people seen these? she wondered. Out of that question, Vintage Black Glamour was born.

“African-Americans who have an interest in American history that includes black people almost have to become amateur detectives and part-time scholars to track down information and that is ridiculous,” she said from her home in New York City.

Gainer, 44, created Vintage Black Glamour on Tumblr in 2011. She put up photos of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on a 1967 vacation in Jamaica, where he wrote his final book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” She unearthed a rare full-color portrait of Zora Neale Hurston from 1940. She reminded readers that Renauld White graced the cover of GQ in 1979, the first African-American man to accomplish that feat.

For Gainer, who attended the creative writing program at New York University, the project is pure “edutainment.” The history buff likes to add context wherever it is available, providing a mini history lesson to match the photos. She has been working with a new imprint, Rocket 88, to bring out a text version this spring.

Gainer said Vintage Black Glamour has a deeper meaning than simple nostalgia over beautiful dresses and sharp suits.

“How we looked and how we put ourselves together…a lot of it was self-preservation and representing an image of how black men and women were,” Gainer explained in a recent interview. “Most vintage photos of African-Americans that get wide exposure tend to be very sober, and even sad.”

These days, Vintage Black Glamour has more than 215,000 fans on Facebook, a popularity that doesn’t surprise its creator.

“People write comments on my social media channels all the time saying things like, ‘I’ve never seen this photo before!’ or ‘I’ve never even heard of this person!'” Gainer said. “And then they go on to talk about what has been left out of the classroom and history books over the years and how that shapes perceptions of African-Americans. But black history is American history — it’s one of my mantras!”

Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood stood in the pulpit at the Amasa Stone Chapel on the Case Western Reserve University campus, thanking university President Barbara Snyder for an impressive introduction and riffing on whether he was a strong enough high school student in Columbus, Ohio, to have been admitted to the Cleveland research institution.