This content is being sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio, but all opinions, ideas, and shenanigans are mine.
Talking Volumes is a literary collaboration between the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio that brings high-profile authors to the Twin Cities for a live interview, later broadcast on MPR, accompanied by in-depth stories about the writers in the Star Tribune. This looks different in 2021, and this year all interviews are virtual which gives people like me (not located in Minneapolis, because I enjoy warm weather) an opportunity to join. Another change this year is that with the 2020 Race Uprisings coming up on their anniversary, they’ve decided to shine a light on race with both their 2021 book selections and author interviews.
I am a Latina woman who has lived her life navigating the experience of being a woman of color in a system that doesn’t always value my existence (see: This is America). I like hundreds of thousands of others, even millions of others, joined the protests after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police Department. I angrily wept for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, wondering how anyone could do this to another human being and worried every day about my Black brothers and sisters living in Miami; and felt ashamed for thanking the universe that my daughters are white passing. This is my truth.
I take issue with the idea that there is a growing racial divide in America. Any casual scholar of American history can tell you that this racial divide has existed as long as the country has existed and the sorting of “us vs. them” is almost an evolutionary birthright. What we really should be talking about is that the racial divide is no longer hiding behind closed doors and the bright light of bystander videos, social media conversations, and pandemic isolation is showing America what it really is. So now we are looking outside of ourselves to artists, and writers, to those who create and make sense of our world and hope that they can give us a more consumable way to understand events, enter MPR’s feature of authors and books which discuss the racial divide in the United States.
