A WORD: GENOCIDE, 3 WRITERS RESPOND
One of the traditions of small literary magazines trying to gain readership is to publish something controversial and then invite other writers to respond. This post follows that tradition. A month ago I published a short essay on whether Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to “genocide”. Here are responses from three writers
All three are incarcerated in California’s San Quentin prison. They take a class called “Race, Resistance and Incarceration” taught by Professor William Drummond, University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism. In addition to teaching this class, Professor Drummond has been taking his UC Berkeley students inside the walls for the last decade to help the inmates put out the San Quentin News.
Bill Drummond is part of the ever-growing NPR diaspora of which I am also a member. He shared my essay with his students and what follows are some of their responses. (Apologies for the various type-faces. The essays came to me in different formats in a pdf file—I assume that is a function of prison conditions—so I wasn’t able to conform them in Substack’s formatting system. )
Essay 1 by Steve Brooks
Essay 2 Juan Moreno Haines
Essay 3 Kevin D. Sawyer
I want to thank Professor William Drummond for sharing my post with his class and I want to thank the authors of these thoughtful essays in response. Bill, is an Oakland native and has written an excellent, very personal book about his connection to San Quentin going back to his childhood called Prison Truth. I urge you to read it.
And, remember, if you want to post your thoughts here in response to my essays you have to be a paid subscriber. I’d love for First Rough Draft of History substack to be a public forum for civil conversation and disagreement. It’s a rare thing these days.