Talking about The R Word

Yesterday I had the opportunity to share about The R Word, my young adult novel, during the chapel service at Valley Forge Christian College. As I said in my talk, it can be difficult to talk about race, especially for white people.  The prevailing cultural belief seems to be that we're supposed to be colorblind, that somehow noticing race makes one racist.  But closing our eyes to inequality doesn't make it go away.  The R Word focuses on a certain kind of inequality, the inequality in education experienced by our nation's students.  Tavis Smiley's documentary, "To Important to Fail," which aired on PBS last week, stated that somewhere near 50% of African American males will drop out of school.  We all pay the price for this, as Smiley points out. It's too important to ignore.

Check out the link to my talk, if you're interested:
 http://www.vfcc.edu/campuslife/?p=webcastArchive&id=606&type=video

And here's the Smiley documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/tsr/too-important-to-fail/