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Racialicious starts us off this week with a thoughtful look at books about black southerners written by white authors, and street-lit written by black writers.

The Washington Monthly takes a look at some disturbing rhetoric that’s come up in the Elena Kagan hearings—not rhetoric about Kagan, but about Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

A group of “Gullah/Geechee, descendants of West African slaves who became some of the nation’s earliest black landowners” are fighting to regain ancestral land in Georgia, from which they were displaced in 1942 and which is now a National Wildlife Refuge.

Ta-Nahisi Coates is also looking at his ancestral heritage; not land but genealogy. He’s sharing his finding and his feelings, including his awe and the strangeness of talking to a white man who may well be a relative.

Most migrant farm workers are undocumented, so when there are anti-immigrant complaints about undocumented workers taking jobs that should go to Americans, these are the jobs they’re talking about, right? Colorlines brings us the story of an organization daring complainers to take those jobs—some of the most dangerous and lowest paying jobs in the country.

Lastly, School Library Journal shares a summer reading poster in Toronto that’s causing a ruckus because “the people depicted with darker skin . . . had very little clothing or were barefoot while the paler characters were fully dressed.” What do you think?

This week’s Video Thursday is a flashback to 1965, and a movie whose distributors sold tickets by using blatant racial scare-tactics.

^{Via Shani Hilton guest-blogging for Ta-Nahisi Coates via PostBourgie via Oscar Willis.}

Reading a little more about it, the NYTimes description of the movie (which is French) says it’s “more thoughtful and less exploitive than its American release title would lead one to expect,” but, frankly, that’s not saying much because it’s harder to get less thoughtless and more exploitive than “My Baby is Black!” And, of course, the trailer proudly proclaims that the movie is “For Mature Adults Only.” I haven’t seen the movie itself, but what the trailer is saying is, “Adults, a black man with a white woman is risqué and exotic, come be titillated—but don’t bring the kids, they might get the idea that an interracial relationship is okay.”

It’s jaw-dropping to jump back a couple decades and see how open and public race-baiting was. But then we’re reminded that we’re not done with racial stereotyping yet:

Via RaceWire, a new music video from Alicia Keys showcases an interracial relationship—and facing the condemnation of friends and families as a result.

No single story—and for all the hopping through time, this is a single story—can represent the variety of interracial relationship and the experiences of people dating cross-culturally, but it’s nice to see a mainstream pop star address race in a mainstream medium.

Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15- October 15th. It is this month that celebrates the anniversary of independance from 5 Latin American countries that include Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatamala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico declared it’s independance day on September 18th, and Chile on September 15th. At Farmer’s Hat Productions, our tagline is [...]