Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson and Dr. Damon Tweedy, who highlighted medicine’s racial disparities in his bestselling memoir “Black Man in a White Coat,” anchor the lineup for Saturday’s Austin African American Book Festival.
Now in its 14th year, the event pivoted online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. That shift indirectly inspired this year’s theme, “We Wear the Mask: Surviving Oppression in the 21st Century,” notes the festival’s director, Rosalind Oliphant Jones.
“While the world was in a flurry of ‘do we wear the mask or do we not wear the mask,’ the rush to find people making masks, ordering masks, I found myself reciting Dunbar’s arguably most well-known poem: ‘We wear the mask that grins and lies/ It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,‘” she says, quoting the opening of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous verse.
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Connections between Dunbar’s work and current events are “undeniable,” Oliphant Jones says.
“For example, with the stories related to COVID-19 came centuries-old stories of inequities in our health care system as it relates to African Americans, such as the Tuskegee Experiment and inadequacies regarding Black women and childbirth, to name a couple,” she says.
Tweedy, whose presentation will open the fest, delved into such inequities in his book, which explores how race impacts health care. It features his own experiences as a medical student and doctor: A professor assumed Tweedy was a handyman instead of a medical student, and Tweedy describes watching in horror as his supervisor asked a pregnant Black teen, “When was the last time you used crack?”
Tweedy’s op-eds have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he recently appeared on “Good Morning America” to talk about the mental health effects of coronavirus-related shutdowns. He splits his time between his medical practice at Durham’s VA Medical Center and Duke University, where he is an associate professor.
Wilkerson’s critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling “The Warmth of Other Suns” used three characters’ stories as the scaffolding to share the history of the Great Migration, when 6 million African Americans left the South. The book — named to more than 30 best-of lists and winner of a National Book Critics’ Circle award — traced how the Great Migration influenced popular music, culture and politics.
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Her next book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” hits shelves in August. It argues that an unspoken caste system rules America, from race to religion to economics: “It is about power — which groups have it and which do not,” according to a publisher’s excerpt.
Dunbar himself will take center stage at noon, thanks to Austin Community College associate professor Mark Cunningham, who will discuss Dunbar’s poetry and its relevance to current events. Saturday is also Dunbar’s birthday, a coincidence Oliphant Jones notes was a surprise as she and her team began planning: “And get this: I did not know nor did it register that Dunbar’s birthday was June 27, the day of our festival this year. To me, that’s God orchestrating the theme in ways I never could.”
And at 1 p.m., archivist and librarian Kymberly Keeton will lead an interactive creative writing workshop about attendees’ experiences during the pandemic. Participants can submit their stories, videos and other creations post-fest to be part of a Black COVID-19 Index.
The event is free, but each session requires separate Eventbrite registration. While switching to an online festival had its learning curve, Oliphant Jones notes that it did remove geographic barriers to attendance, and organizers are seeing registrations from around the country. Visit aaabookfest.org to reserve your spot.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Mark Cunningham is an adjunct professor at Austin Community College. He is listed that way on the college’s website, but he is now an associate professor.
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