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wc.edwards

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wc.edwards last won the day on September 1 2015

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  1. It would work as a film or a play to have whites in the roles of slaves.
  2. Many contests, and some specific ones for African American and Caribbean Authors and a few for young people specifically...search the lists carefully... check it out. I would enter the non-fee ones, but some of the fees are not very much. Good luck http://www.freelancewriting.com/writing-contests.php
  3. Hi, Mr. Mills Jr. try the contest at this address...it's a feeless and for writers of color who don't have agents. http://www.freelancewriting.com/freewritingcontests/FWC-new-visions-awards.php If the book can be for 12 and 18 year olds maybe you can submit it to that contest...the prize is money. I don't know if it's fiction or not. You might also check out the other no fee contests at freelancewriting.com...check back for updates and other contests...If it's an essay type book, there are essay contests as well. Perhaps you can write and essay for the book. Some of the deadlines have past, so you might have to try next year. I think the one below is still open. good luck. Hi, Troy...maybe you can do something with this contest or publicize it more, if you haven't done so already. It's seem like a great opportunity for authors of children and young adult books. I'm sure you know about it. Lee & Low Books' New Visions Awards — No Entry Fee Prize: $1,000.00. Entry fee: $0.00. Deadline: 10-31-2015. WRITING CONTEST WEBSITE LEE & LOW BOOKS, a leading multicultural children's book publisher, is inviting entries to its annual New Visions Awards. Under the company's young adult and middle grade imprint called TU Books (est. 2010), the New Visions Award will be presented for the best MG or YA novel written by a writer of color. The first-place winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000, along with a basic publishing contract (with an advance and royalties). One honorable-mention will receive a cash prize of $500. New Visions Award is open to unagented writers of color who reside in the U.S. and who are unpublished MG or YA book authors. Writers whose written work have been published in other areas such as kids' magazines or picture books, or adult fiction or nonfiction, are qualified. The judges expect stories to engage in the concerns of kids and teens of color by presenting stories that readers can understand, relate to, and associate with their own experiences. The judges encourage themes concerning LGBTQ+ subjects or disabilities. Writers can submit their manuscripts in any fiction genre for children (ages 8-12) or young adults (ages 12-18). The judges enjoy fantasy and science fiction, but also embrace modern, historical, mystery, and suspense. Nonfiction is not accepted. Writers can submit up to two manuscripts per entry, along with a synopsis of the story plus the first five chapters. Read more at: http://www.freelancewriting.com/freewritingcontests/FWC-new-visions-awards.php Copyright © FreelanceWriting.com - All content on our website is copyrighted in the U.S. and internationally and may NOT be re-produced, or re-printed, online or offline. LEE & LOW BOOKS' NEW VISIONS AWARDS (No Entry Fee) - CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST.htm
  4. Troy, it sounds like they killed Chalky White. I might just check out the summary online rather than rent it via HBO's new service or wait until they offer us another few months of free HBO. I can't watch that show without worry because they kill people off you'd rather see make it out to a better, calmer life. Well, maybe Cynique's quote on death becoming the final act in a drama is more apt for Boardwalk since it's just full of death and killing! Speaking of death and killing the Breaking News about Shootings in Canada's government building is on air right now. That might replace the Ebola scare--panic--reporting.
  5. A weed-smoker makes an equally interesting protagonist because marijuana cultivates a fertile imagination and being caught smoking it is a misdemeanor which could involve taunting a cop, which could set the stage for a confrontation. A black youth high on marijuana and a white cop drunk with power fill the roles in a drama where death becomes the final act. But, that's another story. No that is actually the summery of the story in fact. Cynique that's so well said--it's the perfect pitch for the producer to hear!!
  6. Yes, a fascinating post...full of that sense of wonder, too...experiences like Cynique's makes me doubt that "artificial intelligence", whatever that means, can ever be really a self aware consciousness. Machines would in any case have no need for our flaws and limitations, such experiences. There might be more to us than just neurophysiology--a mechanistic view of the brain. This all hinges on questions that verge on the spiritual, not necessarily of religion or any religion per se.
  7. Deleted my posts on all this out of fear that some mentally ill person, white or black, alas, will think my artistic attempt to understand Brown's humanity and his premonitions of impending doom and how it might have influenced his wrong-headed behavior will think or believe it was a justification for his actions.
  8. Those are interesting points and some serious things to think about. How to explain why I find "The Haves and Haves Not" in particular interesting, it's difficult to say. He certainly has done well with his opportunities and is a good example of savvy, business smarts-- using his gifts to achieve fame and success, building his own studio of sorts, if I'm not mistaken. The roles on the show seem pretty unique to me--not your typical cops and soldiers stereotypes. No super-people but flawed people. Other stereotypes. I like the hyperbole. The exaggeration. The show is probably an example of bad taste or even kitschy melodrama, soap opera but I'm not sure...there something about it that appeals to me. I don't watch much television, no sitcoms, no police dramas, nothing except mostly old movies and TV shows, some PBS, news programs. I watch the Sundance channel. I enjoyed some new movies, too. I just started watching Key and Peel, very funny stuff, however safe and tame. I loved Madtv. Dumb and Dumber. I enjoy some History channel programs, C-Span, so this Tyler Perry show's appeal to me is a bit surprising come to think about it. It's probably that I've just taken off my critical hat and I'm not thinking but experiencing it on its own terms. I can do that with a lot of movies, suspend criticism or suspend disbelief. I'm not against genres. Or maybe I'm not so sophisticated after all! The question can whites write black? If we're speaking of strict realistic literary race fiction, I would hazard to say maybe some whites that have experienced some forms of alienation or racial violence: a Jewish writer in Hitler's Germany, experiencing the slave labor camp, might have the empathy or the imagination necessary to find connections between the two holocausts, though one would be more immediate than the other. A film with black actors performing something on race written by a white from empathy rather than experience could do it. But given the nature of a specific black experience, that overwhelming self consciousness as a result of hatred and the cowering that both men and women had to do to survive in the South in particular, to have to put up with insults and denigration in your face as if it was normal, no, most whites have no idea of what that was like--an ethnic white could easily change his name for example and some did in order to make it--the stigma of race isn't really there. But I'm not sure again that the consciousness is the same now. The younger generation of black men for example, don't have to act timid to survive as an everyday reality, to be called boy, for example, and have to take it, they have machine guns in the inner city for example, despite the cases of prison and police brutality now, at least in those parts of the South in the past when humiliating blacks in ordinary circumstances seemed to have been routine, nothing out of ordinary or odd. I'd say things have changed considerably since then, though we all know of incidents of modern day lynching and abuse. But if it's particulars we're talking about, that particular black experience wouldn't be universal. Most ethnics were able to identify with white culture over all, if they assimilated or accepted assimilation despite some discrimination and prejudice. Maybe whites in Africa surrounded by Africans in positions of power may feel a heightened self-consciousness of difference. But the love of family, these would be universals and could be shared whether the writer is black or white but authenticity might be lost depending on the social context of a particular era, the nuances that racism would have on the family experience. It could be researched and the gap filled in by that research, that is the real experience of real people, that could help the writer at least make his best effort at achieving believability. I guess a blind test would be necessary to see if he or she fooled us. We wouldn't know until after finishing the book if the writer was white or black. I think circumstances probably favors your position--given that whites are not compelled by experience to write race specific fiction, a very privileged position. I suspect white editors, readers and publisher probably expect that blacks are compelled to write about black specific issues because of the social condition they are in as victims of racism, people struggling against racism and facing the choice of either forgetting or remembering what happened to their ancestors. The only others who face similar choices would be Jewish writers concerned about what happened in the past and what might happen again, any current ethnic and religious groups, or castes facing various forms of discrimination in other countries. I've been hearing a lot about modern slavery in different parts of the world, so writers emerging from those groups would have the necessary background.
  9. Cynique, you have the imagination of a science fiction writer. Your other points on color interests me as well. I'm more impressed by Tyler Perry's writing white characters than his black characters because it seems white authors were privileged to write about anything under the sun, they could put themselves in everyone shoes, correctly or incorrectly, so I'm happy to see his freedom to recreate whites as it were. I don't believe any author white or black should be confined to exploring the personalities and cultures of only the groups, classes and races assigned to him. If they give you ruled paper write the other way to paraphrase something I read in a Ray Bradbury book. I admire Bradbury a lot because he used the library to teach himself and loved libraries. The truism of write what you know has subtleties of meaning, it doesn't necessarily mean biography or just from your culture, never true in genre fiction in any case, and certainly not true in science fiction and fantasy. I think it's good if black authors can write white characters because writing beyond one's race or experience should not be the privilege of whites only. And all authorial conceptions are the conceptions of the authors own wishes, needs and indeed politics as you correctly stated. I feel this keenly about escapism, escapism is a form of politics in art--there is cultural consensus on subject matter, and there is some merit in the argument that explicit propaganda and morality plays are boring and does bore audiences. I find a lot of good intentioned "black" problem films suffer from this, but since I know a lot about the problems in the black community maybe it bores me more. I think this is why more than a lot of stuff about poverty and racism I loved the Black Panther when he appeared in the Fantastic Four. He had problems but it wasn't what I already knew. I bought or it was bought for me at a a local A&P in the 70s black history comics, they were in these plastic bags on a rack, if I recall correctly--they certainly weren't exciting as the Black Panther and even white superhero comics. You speak off subliminal techniques, escapism does seem to work subliminally, given our fight or flight instincts. Its moralities, social codes and all the status quo politics is represented indirectly like a magician's slight of hand. The only thing that's clearly explicit is the happy ending, de riqueur. India is a great example of probably a mixing that did not necessarily produce much equality, but I hear that there is some embarrassment there now over the use of skin whitening creams and formulas. I suspect white Indians are the elites there. I guess nobody wants to be black because of its symbolic aspects then. Classicism and caste would as you say become the new racism. Did they inherit this from British colonialism or was it there before. The whole Dravidian thing is fascinating, too. Tony Brown I think did a show on the outcast castes in India, very black Indians, blacker than some American Negroes. We're fortunate to be in America despite its problems. India I think has far worse social problems than America--maybe because overpopulation and their own flawed social order. It sounds like a theme for a Vonnegutian satire, movie or play: But I've never deceived myself into thinking that if everybody was the same color, all our dilemmas would disappear. Classism would, in all probability, complete the emerging trend of becoming the new racism. Yes, everyone is the same but of different classes, social ranks, caste--all that fight for equality. Have you ever wondered if there was a biological reason to keep people apart even of the same species--how did this come to be? Just the seasons. A change in the pigmentation of our genes.
  10. I forgot to mention that the terrible thing about the Black Jack story is that he would've inherited his mother, a slave and other slaves. HIs white father's love of him didn't include any convervation to free slaves and to not exploit them. It makes for a bit of suspense, too, will he or won't he free his mother and the other slaves. Looking back at old Hollywood films at the heyday of filmmaking it's remarkable how little reality existed in terms of black contributions to the West, for example and other things: movies about race horse Jockeys, whale ship crews, most early films fail to show history with blacks participating in almost every area. The cowboys and Indians, the calvalry. It's to your point Cynque, about the exclusion of them from history. I'm not even saying they should take the lead, which would've been nice, but you could say in the background of reality versus escapsim when a film ignores or censors history altogether it only contributes to ignorance and unreality--there is some interesting revisionist history on Disney's use of race which suggest it was more positive than not, quite a contradiction but that's life, full of contradictions. So in the above example the mosre escapist films censors historical matter present and past, or avoids the troublesome and difficult, the more they contribute to ignorance. Who could argue for more ignorance of true history. But how to convinve people not in my choir of this,that's the problem.
  11. Again, just talking shop, history, literature, fiction--the place of this racial material in entertainment--the arts. How do we use this stuff as artists faced with the commercial demands to entertain people. If art has no moral purpose except to help people escape from reality is it worth pursuing? Can non-commercial art survive against pure special effects spectacle. If you still persist in being an artist in this day and age, you have to confront these questions. The world really doesn't need any more escapism, so what good is the artist, what is his role--a propagandist for the status quo, a preaching to the choir moralist, who tells people what they already know--can the ideal work of art make a real difference at a time like this? Does the best consensus on history matter also. Wondering aloud again.
  12. Cynique that's also a neat little idea for a science fiction story. Cynically speaking, of course the aliens would reject the lot of us! Until we cleaned up our act on this poor planet. When I mentioned jealousy I think if I recall right, among some Afrocentrics there is this conclusion that there was jealousy, envy involved, given the age and prowess of ancient Egypt this as explanation for the cover-up, the evidence being destroyed, denigrated, but I didn't see that in the documents I looked at. My source for blacks in the Roman period I can't recall right now, a book I read quickly and didn't get to study long. The mainstream view maybe correct in that as long as locals adopted the Roman ways, they were accepted into the Empire, it wasn't so much skin or race but their religious beliefs and economic dominance that was at stake for them--I think the example of how they ruled the Middle East maybe an example of this assessment or consensus--the Romans were not racist, at least not in our sense of it. But I could be mistaken, not recalling correctly.
  13. If aliens from Mars landed on Earth would they find Caucasians more appealing and attractive than Negroids? Europeans more appealing than Africans? Asians equally acceptable? Does the place blackness occupies in nature and the universe have anything to do with the negative vibes it is subjected to???? The dark continent seems to have been doomed from the beginning. Those are very powerful questions, Cynique--much food for thought. I didn't find any jealousy in the texts I mentioned--I forgot what I've read on the Ancient Roman period and their treatment of Africans and this history, they did have black slaves in Rome and other parts of the Empire. Apollonius of Tyana, when he spoke on the matter of these black priests and their connections to India, it seems like a common place belief or knowledge without controversy during that period of Rome. The Romans seems to have regarded their temperate climate as producing an ideal in terms of an early idea on race or civilization. Europe went through a terrible time with the belief in a black devil and demons and hell. The poor and illiterate peasants were frightened. They had rejected or had had their own paganism destroyed or co-opted. These confusions among the common people, the loss or rejection of their own paganism, being afraid of it, also I think contributed to racism during the decades of slavery. The ancient Irish, glimpsed in their folklore, had a lot in common with the Masai, as an example of related pagan beliefs and behavior. They both loved cattle raiding. Lost when Christianity began to dominate them. I see a lot of universality in the myths of all pagan peoples white and black. I used to study the history of European serfdom and I think most white scholar didn't tell the truth about it and like most history written by the victors or the powerful, we really don't get much information directly from the peasants' point of view. I think new scholarship is attempting to sort through the materials to find it. We may have better revisionist scholarship on this now. Take Jefferson, oh boy, it's clear now that there was no romantic love between Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, two revisionist histories has convinced me of that. Jefferson's mistreatment and abuse of his slaves, particularly children, and his own mixed race children was covered up or ignored in the past. Washington at least felt guilty for owning people and regretted it on his death bed. Tragic stories. Jefferson didn't seem to have had any remorse, though they were treated better than the ones that worked in his nail factory. We see how truth matters in this case to white historians at least. There is a controversial critique of Lincoln by a black scholar that I have yet to read but I've heard about the controversy on C-span. I have one of his earliest books. I can't recall his name right now. I have an old stapled booklet from either Dr. Clark or someone else on the possibility that Lincoln was mixed race. I think the mainstream dismisses this saying it was pro-slavery propaganda. I wonder though. I'm sure the more realistic view of Lincoln would show him with flawed feelings or thinking. It doesn't mean he was a monster. But then again humans being over all may be monsters of some sort, all of us, the good, the bad, the ugly and indifferent. This stuff should also matter when it comes to blacks in ancient history. There is a fascinating story in the Washington expose, I forget the author's name for both books, one on Jefferson and Washington--of a white man adoring his mixed race son who seemed more like him than his own white son. It shows the bizarre nature of these relationships. Black Jack, it would make for a great movie. The kid died under mysterious circumstances and never lived past his teens to receive his inheritance. Was it murder or simply the common place disease that struck down many children at that age. Jefferson did not recognize a son who resembled him, could've been mistaken for him.
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