RACISM Archives - Ellen Morris Prewitt

Can America be the Land of the Brave?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on July 6, 2021. Posted in General, GOD, RACISM. 8 Comments

Y’all know this story, right? About how King David of Israel saw a woman bathing and asked who she was. David’s advisors told him she was the wife of Uriah, one of David’s soldiers. David’s messengers “brought Bathsheba to him.” They had sex. David then arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed in battle...

Get Ready: It’s WTF Time, Y’all

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on June 22, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM. 10 Comments

I want to tell you a story. The characters in this story came from many lands, but eventually their view of themselves sorted around one fact: they did not come from Africa. Or China…or anywhere “that just doesn’t look white.” I’m a character in this story, the starring role, in fact. Fair warning: I’m not the hero. The Story Once...

Zoom Tomorrow to Meet John and Mary Margaret

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on June 3, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM. 2 Comments

There are several ways to explore the past. In John and Mary Margaret, Susan Cushman choses to see Mississippi’s 1960s racial turbulence of Mississippi through the eyes of an unlikely interracial couple at Ole Miss. Watching history through the eyes of young love, plus the mature reflection of a second chance, gives us an intimate look at...

Wiping the Slate Clean

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on May 17, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM, Writing. 16 Comments

You know when you’ve solved a complex calculus equation, and you take the eraser and literally wipe the slate clean? I did that last week with my writing career. Three acceptances triggered the erasure: First, I was accepted into the Community Writers Workshop in the Virtual Valley for July of this year. This fabulous writers conference...

So You Love that Racist Movie?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on April 23, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM. 4 Comments

Scene I Y’all, Gone with the Wind was my first grown-up movie (that means my first movie that wasn’t a Saturday morning matinee where my friends and I ran up and own the aisles acting like fools). We went at night, my mother and two sisters and I. Watching this movie I learned a very important plot point. During the burning of Atlanta,...

Do You Know Your Patterns of Racism?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on April 7, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM. 18 Comments

All the news about attacks on Asian Americans, I wanted to speak out. So I began writing a blog post, and soon enough, I took a hard turn and found myself re-hashing our national history of white racism toward Black folks, with some scant references to indentured Chinese. I wrote, and I revised, and somehow I couldn’t get it right. Then I realized,...

If We Don’t Know about Racism, Maybe it’s Our Own Fault

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on January 24, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM. 4 Comments

The Public Defender broke the news: the DA was dismissing the charges against my friend. We were seated in his office, a small, square space with a desk and chair and not much else. I was there in my year-long wade through racism and incompetence in support of my friend. A white woman had claimed—three months after the fact—he had stolen her purse....

When Your President Can Do No Wrong

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on January 12, 2021. Posted in General, RACISM. Leave a Comment

The dry cleaners my grandparent owned smelled like hot cloth and headache-inducing sizing and musty Town Creek. I could kneel on the floor, squint an eye over a hole, and watch the creek flow beneath downtown Jackson, Mississippi. When I rose, I dusted my dirty palms as the iron sewing machine whirred, stabbing and hemming, mending and sewing. Late...

Malcolm X has died, and I am Full of Sorrow

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on December 16, 2020. Posted in General, RACISM. 2 Comments

Malcolm has died three times in my last four months. First, he died in Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Then he went silent at the end of The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told To Alex Haley. But his death in Les Payne’s The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X was the most difficult. In Les Payne’s opus,...

Where Do We Go from Here?

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on October 29, 2020. Posted in General, RACISM, Writing. 6 Comments

The revisions to my Mississippi novel have reached the “listening to the computer read to me” stage. I’ve received wonderfully helpful feedback from Beta readers and spent 2 months implementing it. “Implementing” sounds so neutral, but I wrote another 20,000 words and revised the ones I already had on the page. Now...