Guernica Magazine

”If you’re a black artist dealing with non-black...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:02:35 -0400

”If you’re a black artist dealing with non-black issues, that throws people for a loop. If you’re a non-black artist dealing with black issues, that also throws people for a loop. People are mentally lazy, and they want to draw the shortest line between two points.”

via Heavyweight Paint- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"The point was that there was an occupying army in the black community that was judge and..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:01:28 -0400

““The point was that there was an occupying army in the black community that was judge and executioner.””

- via A Long Time to Change- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you’re writing about race, as if the..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:01:35 -0400

““People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you’re writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone’s brown skin.””

- via Does Truth Have a Tone?- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"This country is used to thinking in terms of binaries—black and white."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:02:48 -0400

“This country is used to thinking in terms of binaries—black and white.”

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via Beyond the Binary Behind Bars- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

“When I heard that King had died, two details in particular stuck out to me. One was that he...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:30:34 -0400

“When I heard that King had died, two details in particular stuck out to me. One was that he died in a swimming pool. The other was that, earlier that day, somebody had heard him scream.”

via A Clear Presence- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"By the time you found out Percy Jackson wasn’t the name of a conflicted black boy from Birmingham,..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:30:32 -0400

“By the time you found out Percy Jackson wasn’t the name of a conflicted black boy from Birmingham, but a fake-ass Harry Potter who saved the gods of Mount Olympus, you were already broken.”

- via You Are The Second Person- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

Our new issue is here: Race in America

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:57:28 -0400

lucid dreaming and Rodney King, defining “real black writing,” fiction by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés and Kirstin Valdez Quade, painting portraiture, rendering the criminal justice system, poetry by Don Mee Choi and Rae Paris, and interviews with Jamaica Kincaid, Juanita Diaz-Cotto, and Judy Juanita

Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

“Viewing the non-Western world as an unchanging repository of “tradition” and the West as...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:01:20 -0400

“Viewing the non-Western world as an unchanging repository of “tradition” and the West as the rightful home of modernity lead to the neglect of contemporary Asian artists whose works aimed to meaningfully engage with the modern Asian experience.”

from our archives- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"Soon, her brief looks turned into a full out read-along session. Our arms pressed together, neither..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:30:35 -0400

“Soon, her brief looks turned into a full out read-along session. Our arms pressed together, neither of us spoke as we read the last few pages of the chapter titled, “Have You Ever Wanted to Not Be Black?”

- On being the black person reading How To Be Black on the subway, from our archives- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"Conditions are the same now,” she said. “I don’t know why it’s not happening again."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:01:10 -0400

“Conditions are the same now,” she said. “I don’t know why it’s not happening again.”

- Looking back at the L.A. riots, from our archives- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"Nearly 90% of the books reviewed by The New York Times are written by white writers. That is not..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:30:26 -0400

“Nearly 90% of the books reviewed by The New York Times are written by white writers. That is not even remotely reflective of the racial makeup of this country, where 72% of the population, according to the 2010 census, is white. We know that far more than 81 books were published by writers of color in 2011. You don’t really need other datasets to see this rather glaring imbalance.”

- From our friend Roxane Gay at The Rumpus- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

Is this what the golden age of publishing should look like? via The Atlantic- Guernica / A Magazine...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:01:44 -0400

Is this what the golden age of publishing should look like?

via The Atlantic- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"Mainstream journalism, with its endless unpaid internships, has come far from its working-class..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:10:18 -0400

“Mainstream journalism, with its endless unpaid internships, has come far from its working-class newspaper roots. Getting your start in journalism often doesn’t pay. Instead, you have to chip in to join the club.”

- The Nation’s Farai Chideya on race, class, and the journalism industry-Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

On Asian-American identity and racism: “I don’t believe my friends mean to be racist, but...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:43:27 -0400

On Asian-American identity and racism:

“I don’t believe my friends mean to be racist, but if we tell ourselves we have no relationship to racism, that we don’t participate and aren’t complicit in perpetuating racial inequality in a hundred different ways each day, we’re kidding ourselves. Myself included. My own silence in the face of discomfort is complicity.”

from our own Cathy Chung in The Rumpus- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

"The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:30:29 -0400

“The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches.”

- via Fear of a Black President, The Atlantic- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

Throughout their enforced stay in the United States, as their...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:02:17 -0400

Throughout their enforced stay in the United States, as their papers were tidied up and then during their journey across that continent, Mrs Ballard seemed to wear the same dress, long and straight—knitted out of string, you would have said with a white collar, sometimes with points, sometimes rounded, held together at the throat by a cairngorm.

via The Hanging Garden - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

"If I had to construct the typical magazine editor he would be a white male, who’d gone to an..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:00:56 -0400

“If I had to construct the typical magazine editor he would be a white male, who’d gone to an Ivy, and lived in either Boston, New York, or D.C. So the profile for the magazine industry — especially when you compare it to the broader field of journalism — is really thin, and unrepresentative of America, though arguably very representative of American aspiration.”

- The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s commentary on race and publishing- Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics

“I wonder if what we do as Korean Americans is so very...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:01:46 -0400

“I wonder if what we do as Korean Americans is so very different from what they do in Korea with the traditions of China. If we are headed towards becoming a performance of the myths of the homeland that would be bizarre and even antiquated to the people who live there now.”

via Korean Enough - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

"And when you date Korean girls, it’s like there’s so much cultural baggage that comes along with..."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:01:18 -0400

“““And when you date Korean girls, it’s like there’s so much cultural baggage that comes along with them—are you going to marry them, are you just using them for sex? Are you going to become a doctor? Oh good. And what part of Korea are your parents from?”’”

- From our fiction archives: Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

I think your discomfort, or your preemptive discomfort, about...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:01:18 -0400

I think your discomfort, or your preemptive discomfort, about reading a memoir by a woman about how great it is to be a mom, partly has to do with gender roles, and maybe what you grew up with, and what you maybe felt is expected of you. I do think that people like Tony and myself who write about being a father now are in this period where everyone’s like “Oh, you’re thrilled to be a dad, that’s great!”

Better Off Said- Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics