Race: An Anthology in the First Person

By Bart Schneider

What is your race? In September 1994,The Hungry Mind Review's readers responded to this and nineteen other race-related questions in the periodical's now-renowned Race questionnaire. It was during the compilation of that particular issue that editor Bart Schneider recognized that Americans were ready for, and needed to have, a frank discussion about race. Inspired by the momentum that September 1994 issue generated, Schneider compiledRace: An Anthology in the First Person. In a range of twenty first-person idioms, some of the finest American contemporary writers and social leaders explore the issue of race. The power of the first person voice that drives this collection is in its directness and simplicity, says Schneider: it's you talking to me, me to you. It's Reverend Cecil Williams preaching to hundreds on a Sunday morning in San Francisco's Glide Church. It's Audre Lorde speaking to a women's conference in Connecticut. It's John Edgar Wideman talking in letter, and in spirit, to his son in prison. Listening closely to the human voice can keep us human. Racecontinues what the questionnaire started by delivering direct and honest accounts of how race can impact an individual's life and alter the course of his of her future. To approach with passionate personal testimony a territory as fraught with suffering and shame, guilt and indifference, rhetoric and amnesia,??is to stake a claim, explains Schneider. It is to demand a place in which we can talk to each other about who we are and what we hope America might one day become.Racewill open your eyes, expand your mind, and may finally be a way for us to get the conversation going.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517887282
• ISBN13: 9780517887288
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

more than black and white

In designing a college research-writing course on race, I am always hungry for personal narrative as a way of eliciting some of the emotions I suspect will be present in the room as we attempt to have a critical conversation about race. The voices in this anthology offer some of the most compelling narratives on race I've ever read, and it is my hope that every student will be able to connect with at least SOME of these voices. Not only do they represent a diverse spectrum of racial identities and experiences, but the essays are also written in a variety of literary styles, so that in addition to discussing the subject matter of these narratives, the rhetorical questions of tone, style, audience, and purpose become relevant and interesting topics of discussion as well. The copyright date on this anthology (1997) places its concerns in the early 90s with issues like the O.J. trial (Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gerald Early), the Million Man March (John Powell), and the immigration policies of the Clinton administration (Leslie Marmon Silko). I have to say honestly that I'm not sure many sophomores (born in 1990-91) will be able to connect with the Gates essay on O.J., but personally I find it to be one of the most incisive pieces in the book. Gates' analysis of the racially divided response to the trial transformed my understanding of its cultural significance. Other high points of this anthology: Peggy McIntosh's seminal essay on white privilege, Audre Lorde's "The Uses of Anger," Luis Rodriguez' recollections on gang culture, and Ira Glasser's complete history of race in America dating back to colonization and slavery. More than any text I've encountered, Glasser's essay delivers a reader-friendly, comprehensive historical overview of racial inequality and a crystal clear explanation of why/how it is that despite sparks of hopeful progress, the legacies of slavery and genocide committed hundreds of years ago have never properly been confronted or healed. Indeed, there is still much work to be done in the fight for racial justice. The essays in this book chronicle the wounds left by racial injustice and seek to restore an otherwise silenced history of courage and triumph. The book is well worth its miniscule price. It will open up a wide range of conversation topics that will both explain and splinter the black/white binary.