Brevity’s Race, Racism, and Racialization Special Issue

Brevity’s 52^nd issue, reporting and examining lived experiences of race, racism, and racialization and the intersections between race and gender, class, dis/ability, and language, launched today.

Our Special issue includes work by Roxane Gay, Kendra Allen, Julie Azzam, Sasha Bonét, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Sarah Chávez, Tyrese Coleman, Alice Rose Crow, Bradley Donaldson, Katelyn Hemmeke, Jacob Hilton, Deeshaw Philyaw, Lisa Romeo, Sejal Shah, Samuel Stokley, Christina Tang-Bernas, and our first ever student writing competition winner, Danielle Geller. Our special guest editors are Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang and our guest artist is Damon Locks.

The issue would never have been possible without the focused efforts of our Special Projects Editor Sarah Einstein.

The brief essays we present cannot, of course, cover the subject completely, and there were many crucial voices and perspectives we could not fit into this issue. We received over 400 submissions, and we hope that every author who sent work to us that we couldn’t publish here will send out those works until they are published elsewhere, because this is a conversation that should not—cannot—be limited to special issues and certain journals. This is a conversation that needs to be happening all the time, everywhere.

Our hope is that these essays will spark the conversations that we, as a nation and as citizens of the world, desperately need to be having about how race is constructed, the many great indignities of racism, and the ways in which racialization serves the interests of those systems which rely on the marginalization of the other in order to maintain power. The goal of this issue is not to try to host this conversation in all its complexity, but merely to offer up a number of points of entry from which the reader can find her own way into that conversation.

Thanks for reading.