Comments on: BOOKS ARE A GATEWAY DRUG

By: Free Press Houston » Get Your PhD in Librotraficante Studies: An Interview with Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante

Mon, 12 Nov 2024 19:46:09 +0000

[…] Books Are A Gateway Drug […]

By: nata

nata — Sun, 21 Oct 2024 01:08:16 +0000

this is a badass article!

…dang. i just cursed on the internet.

By: Free Press Houston » WHY DID THE JACKASS CAMP OUT IN THE ROAD?

Free Press Houston » WHY DID THE JACKASS CAMP OUT IN THE ROAD? — Thu, 19 Apr 2024 17:05:36 +0000

[…] the economy into the ground and then get bonuses on top of that, or how he feels about stuff like books being bannedin this country, this year, and our rights being taken away with laws like the Cyber Intelligence […]

By: Free Press Houston » Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso: Librotraficante Road Report #3

Wed, 04 Apr 2024 16:56:40 +0000

[…] Houston Librotraficante embedded road report. For background, check out my previous articles: Books Are A Gateway Drug, Remember the Alamo, and Revenge of the Nerds. This picks up where the last post left […]

By: Harbeer

Harbeer — Wed, 21 Mar 2024 22:09:09 +0000

Thank you for a very fair and thoughtful comment, Ann. I mean no offense but I could have done a better job of explicating. I sometimes take it as a given that we all already agree that, as one of my good friends, a “white” ally put it, “whiteness as a concept was created to justify mistreatment of other socially constructed races.”

For a really great historical explanation of how “whiteness” was created to divide people of lesser economic means so that they would not unite to challenge those who exploited them, watch this really excellent clip of a Tim Wise speech.

So, it’s not that the inundation of “white” culture is “burdensome,” it’s that the whole concept of “whiteness” was invented to oppress. Looking back on US history alone, there was a time when groups of people we all now commonly accept as “white” were not considered so: the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews…they all went through a period of great discrimination against them until they were assimilated into the dominant class. Even GERMANS (well, non-Saxon Germans), who we tend to think of as blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic gods, were offensive to none other than Benjamin Franklin, who wrote:

in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

“White,” in other words, is shorthand for “belonging to the dominant group,” and when I speak out against “whiteness,” I am speaking out against that domination and oppression. To be honest, I have class resentment, not racial resentment. I tend to favor the marginalized–I would prefer to read the work of a poor “white” lesbian author like Dorothy Allison not because of identity politics but because I find her words, characters, and settings more compelling even than those of a privileged South Asian person, like Jhumpa Lahiri (whose stuffy, Ivy League educated characters are just boring and their dramas petty–to me, though I do not begrudge anybody their pleasure and am glad to see *anybody* reading *anything!*)

As for the irreverent tone of the article, again, I could possibly tone it down but I’m also playing to the FPH audience here…you know? I would write it differently if it was for an academic audience

By: Ann

Ann — Wed, 21 Mar 2024 15:45:30 +0000

Wonderful article. We have so much to learn from each other and I sincerely believe that the more we learn about other cultures the more we will understand and even honor the concept of individuality that is so important. There are great people in every culture from which we must learn. There are also deplorable people in each culture from which we must learn. Nothing should be hidden. All of this information is relevant to becoming an informed individual.
I have only one point of critique for you, which I hope you take openly and not defensively. In your article you site and praise representation of “hyphen-American literature”. I agree with you and will go further by expanding the thought beyond literature. I am a proponent of every person learning as much as he/she can about other cultures, in the present and in history. However, as a “white” woman, I had to cringe at every reference to the historically dominant “white” culture. In the article, you reference African-Americans, Chican@s, a gay black man, a Jewish woman, all in non-defamatory language (thank you). However the only references to “white” culture are: ‘white bread’, ‘redneck’, ‘boring crap’ (referring to the “white” literature…and yes some of it was very boring, but that is beside the point. Even as a “white” woman, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, was way more relevant to me and my life than Pride and Prejudice ever was.) The only “white” person you reference is a racist, or at the very least, a woman afraid of change and other cultures.
I understand that the inundation of “white” culture in America must be burdensome and I, as a “white” person, don’t understand how it is to be a minority in the cultural sense. However, as an author you reach a lot of people and thank you for your message, but might I suggest your point would be more meaningful and more effective if it actually did celebrate all cultures or at a minimum was absent of the undercurrent of vilification of one.
Again thank you for the article and its important point on striving to understand each other.

By: mames

mames — Tue, 13 Mar 2024 21:43:22 +0000

Education is a basic human right and nobody should be denied the opportunity to learn and broaden their thought and perspective, but not all people are allowed this basic right.

Education Under Fire is a movement, co-sponsored by Amnesty International, and supported by two Noble Laureates deals with the arrest, torture and the denial of the right to higher education for the past thirty years for all of the members of Iran\’s largest non-Muslim religious minority – the Baha’is.

A segment of the documentary, the Nobel Laureate letter, and information on our petition which has over 16,000 signatories is available online at http://www.educationunderfire.com/