Maybe it was the time of year that reminded me, but this simple little watercolor was what I felt like painting last weekend. I grew up not far from here, and this sort of agricultural, rolling landscape of hills and fields is what really feels like "home." The historic little village of Paris Hill is to the left of this view; the stone wall borders an old graveyard and there's a lovely church at the crossroads; this land sits on a high point in the hills, below Utica and the Mohawk valley, and is beautiful and pastoral in every direction and in every season, though it's notorious for blowing and drifting snow in the winter! I can remember coming home from many high school wrestling matches against the Utica-area schools and wondering if we'd make it past Paris Hill.

Unfortunately the NYS department of transportation has put a highway right through these fields, so it doesn't look like this any longer. I love the place, though, and did an oil painting of these fields from a slightly different angle a long time ago.

This was also my first successful foray back into this sort of watercolor. It's less fluid and expressive than where I intend to go, but I was quite happy – as any watercolorist is – to have a painting end up in the "keeper" drawer instead of in pieces in the wastebasket (which a couple of other attempts did.) The agony and ecstasy of painting is definitely contained in this medium, where happy "accidents" often make the painting, and unhappy mistakes or decisions usually can't be corrected. Here, for instance, I didn't intend the white patches where my brush skipped along the smooth green bean field at center right, but they help the picture tremendously. On the other hand, the green of the fields should continue at the end of the stone wall and touch the trees, but there's no way to fix that once the paint is dry. Every watercolor contains a myriad of such things, unless you're John Singer Sargent or Winslow Homer – but I bet even they had their share of disasters!

This one is done on a sample sheet of handmade watercolor paper from La Papeterie St-Armand, an artisan papermaking mill along the Lachine Canal in Montreal, which I visited some months ago. This is a cold press sheet with plenty of texture, and I liked working on it very much.

Yesterday was my birthday, and it really couldn't have been a nicer day. Great weather, a number of good wishes from friends online and on Facebook, a phone call from my dad, and lots of love from my husband, who also has a birthday coming up, so this is our party week.

For lunch he made me a terrific BLT (we don't eat bacon very often, and this was soooo good); in mid-afternoon we met a friend for coffee and a chat at a cafe in the neighborhood, and in the evening we had Persian kebabs at a restaurant we like but haven't visited in a long time. The kebabs (my favorite are kubideh, made of spiced ground beef molded onto flat skewers) were served with grilled whole tomatoes, basmati rice with saffron and barberries, an excellent traditional yogurt-and-spinach sauce and another made from roasted eggplants, tomato and garlic that was so good we ate it with a spoon.

Although the numerical accumulation of years (58 of them) still strikes me as incredible, even impossible, I'm not one to moan about it. Considering the alternative, I'm grateful to be here still, and I try as much as I can to be glad for each day. I'm also happy to be living in a place where, thanks to the French, women "of a certain age" are still considered beautiful and desirable, in a society that encourages individuality and style and eschews "rules" about "age-appropriate" dress and behavior. In honor of that, I now have a short, ruffly skirt which J. spotted and liked while we were shopping on Sunday, and several pairs of new stockings and tights in lace and nice colors.

My grandmother, who lived to 92, set us a good example. She never stopped being interested in fashion, but it wasn't the kind that requires thousand-dollar outfits from Prada. Living in a small town as she did, most of the acquisition and execution was up to her; she was a good seamstress and always sewed with Vogue patterns, never daunted by designer details, and she and my mother taught me to sew. She loved color and bold patterns and had the confidence to carry it off, even when she was very old indeed. On Thursday, I'm going on a birthday-celebratory fabric and pattern-shopping excursion with one of my sewing friends here. I'm looking forward to making a few things, but also just to the feeling of fabric-shopping and garment-planning, which I haven't done for a long time. Unlike the small town where I grew up, this is a city with a garment and costume industry and lots of fabric and notions stores; it will be fun, and I'll report!

We haven't been back to Vermont in a long time, but this is what the White River near our former village looks like on autumn mornings. Doing this pastel study, which looks upstream to the west, made me remember it vividly.

I used to take a walk around the village and to the post office nearly every morning, and would usually end by going across the long bridge and looking at the life of the river – the state of the ice in the winter; the color, speed and height of the water, which I could read like the clouds and sky; the presence of warblers and ducks in the spring; beavers in the summer; cedar waxwings in the locust grove; and ospreys overhead in the autumn. Standing at this spot, below the bridge, I can still feel the cold dampness of the fog that settles in the river valley almost every fall night, just starting to lift at nine or even ten o'clock, and feel the wetness on my feet and soaking into my jeans as I make my way down the bank through dew-heavy grasses and overgrown honeysuckle.

When I began those walks, as far back as 1979, there was little traffic on the bridge but that changed with the development of more housing; by the time we left there was a lot of commuter traffic and I can still hear the exact rattle and clatter of the bridge and passing wheels over my head, and look up to see the pigeons arrayed on the power lines stretching across the river, never disturbed in the least even by the largest trucks. Down below, I was always conscious of the great division between the human life above and the ecosystem of the river below and grateful for what seemed like a miracle of separation. In spite of the cars, the huge concrete supports required for the bridge, the salt-soaked snow the town dumped on the banks, and the inevitable detritus that tumbled down from the impoverished homes, the indifferent traffic on the bridge, the decaying diner, and hobo campfires along the railroad track, the river maintained a vitality that surprised and somehow buoyed me all the time I lived there.

Close to the White River's junction with the much-larger Connecticut, we were downriver from the rapids, but the river was still fast when there was a lot of water in it, particularly so in spring with the snow melt from the surrounding hills. Rocks like the ones in this picture had been scoured repeatedly by three-foot-thick blocks of ice and large logs – even entire trees – uprooted and swept downstream when the ice went out in March. The water then came so high on the banks that, during a flurry of village renewal, we knew there was no point in creating riverside trails because they'd be destroyed every year by the flood. Water quality increased, too, during the time I lived there. Standing on the riverbank one could see plenty of life in the water, and the dominant smells were the competing odors of vegetation growing and flowering, and decaying back into the wet earth.

I'm not nostalgic for the place we left, but I realize, perhaps better now with this distance, that there was a lot of emotion associated with the river for me, that I saw it as both companion and symbol.

One can't put all of that into a picture, but a picture can put the mind where it has not been.

I’ve come to Rio de Janeiro for a wedding. The groom is my
wife’s cousin, but he isn’t a particularly close cousin, and family
loyalty accounts only for part of why I’m here. There must be another
reason, and the reason is what it always is these days when I get into
a plane: I travel to complicate my idea of what it means to be in this
world.

On the drive into Rio de Janeiro from the airport
earlier, I had noticed the bridges and highways. For them to have been
built, there must have been some kind of more or less efficient
interaction between the economy and the national and metropolitan
political structure. The same, or a similarly, more or less efficient
interaction is necessary to keep the roads and bridges in good repair.
Below the bridges, which are made of concrete, there is evidence of
dredging. Beyond them, rock has been blasted to create tunnels through
the mountains. In some neighborhoods, unpromising land was salvaged for
construction, some of it shoddy; as in most cities, what is rich and
what is poor can be seen in the landscape. That journey in is in early
morning light, and the favelas hang on the sides of the mountains. But
apparent, also, is the fact that this is a rich country.

Long
ago all we knew of other places were adventurers’ reports and the
material testimony of far-fetched goods. The other place was always
wondrous wonder or wondrous disorder, and Herodotus selected anecdotes
only for their strangeness. The distant shore is a place for our dreams
to rest, and foreign countries exist not for their own sake but for
ours. “Long ago all we knew,” and it remains so even now: India, Italy,
Morocco, Brazil: each is summarized to answer in a different way the
pre-set question of travel. At night the mountains of Rio look like
hills. Seen from the bridge bringing us back into the city, a dense
network of lights on each describes a dark shape. Each hill is like a
chocolate cake covered in confectioners’ sugar. This is the land of
football, carnival, and samba, a joyous place, given to simple
pleasures, unserious in all the best ways. Everybody fucks everybody,
the races mix without anxiety, and the country is blended into shades
of caramel, a preview in microcosm of what the world will look like
someday. That is the story; but these are not the things I think about
when I first enter the city. My thoughts are on first principles, that
a city is a built thing, a made thing. To start with the land is
“discovered,” won in a battle or in battles, and is tamed and ordered
through the efforts of centuries so that its ports and its hinterlands
are able to feed, serve, and entertain a large population. A city that
manages to do those things well, grows until it becomes a megalopolis.

As
cities go, Rio de Janeiro is not unusual. The first thing I note, as I
begin to mentally review the infrastructure, as I begin my haphazard
inquiry, is how similar the built environment is to that of every other
great city I know: the overpasses and underpasses, the street vendors,
the massive buildings in various states of newness or disrepair, the
patient commuters crowding the bus-stops, the evidence of things built
by politicians, things built by consensus and on the back of a complex
capitalist economy. Only later do I begin to note the dissimilarities:
this is another city, an unusual city, and it is another country. It
is, above all, in another continent and hemisphere, and there is a deep
strangeness to a place in which the land and its water are related to
each other by an almost familiar logic, where the geological processes
as well as the evolution of animals and plants have led to different
results. At night, I see Venus in an unexpected part of the night sky.
When I run water down the sink, I look for the Coriolis effect. Within
a few days, I have seen bays, inlets, birds, insects, leaves, and
fruits unlike any I knew before, with variations in color, smell,
cries, size, and scale. Only the humans are basically the same, the
behavior of the humans, their self-defence, their sentimentality, their
needless cruelties. Only the humans need no special interpretation—or
so I think—the humans and their dogs.

I see only one
black person on my flight to Rio, the dry-skinned and skeptical man who
peers at me from the mirror in the airplane toilet. Everyone else on
the flight is white, or just one or two Mediterranean shades south of
white. But on disembarkation, I see two other black men, one about the
color of the current American president, the other darker than me,
older, and wearing a “Jazz New Orleans” t-shirt. The darker man stands
with me and a handful of others in the passport line for non-citizens.
The Brazilian line is considerably longer and looks like the Brazil I
saw in Astoria. But several of the baggage handlers and groundstaff—I
begin to look around now, and get into a mood, and begin to count—are
black, some of them mulatto, some slave-dark. There is an aggravated
division, though I don’t want to come to such conclusions so early in
the journey. This is not the story the world tells itself about Brazil,
or that Brazil advertises to the world about itself.

There
are many more blacks on the streets. At a crossing, young black boys
swarm the cars, selling cell-phone chargers and newspapers. They look
like Nigerians, like the boys who descend on cars at intersections in
Lagos. But places are not transparent, and understanding why things in
a place are as they are does not come easily. I know that my
understanding of divisions between the races is formed by American
history and by my own experience in that country and can only take me
so far in here. Would I come closer to the truth if I read a study on
Brazilian race-relations? I would come closer to a truth, I am sure; but there’s a truth also in the immediacy of my own experience.

Later,
I visit two beaches, whites-only beaches (or so the casual visitor
would think) about two hours from Rio. One is for a richer clientele,
the other less so, but almost all the blacks I see at both are vendors
or workers. At the richer one, in Buzos, I enter a restaurant for
lunch. The maitre d’ ignores my greeting, pretending not to see me.
After a few awkward moments, I seat myself. Then I notice him
whispering instructions to a black waiter, and it is this waiter alone
who serves me and speaks to me while I am there. It is tempting to
think the incident explains itself, but what what one sees while
traveling is rarely self-explanatory. Each place has its own worries
and there’s a sense in which what is visible is the wake of a
particular history, fleeting, active, but answering to a large and
unseen thing. Each society deceives itself in particular ways. The
forms of oppression that were practiced here for so long lead to
specific pathologies in the society. In Rio there appears to be more
socializing across the races than in the US. But there also seems to be
an elaborate and finely-tuned colorism at work: among people who would
all be considered black in the US, there is a hierarchy of color. The
northern European whites and the Mediterranean whites are more likely
to socialize with fair-skinned blacks, and it isn’t unusual to see
groups of blacks in which everyone in the group is within a narrow
range of color: very dark, brownish, yellow, and so on. It isn’t the
one-drop rule. The number of drops matters.

The
guidebooks are full of warnings about the blacks, though of course the
warnings are not expressed so baldly. One must not visit favelas alone,
one must be careful in certain districts, and be alert on the metro,
and avoid walking at night. It appears to be sensible advice, but there
is a hysterical tone in the warnings. The warnings are intended for
white tourists. I am a young black man, and my mode of dress and bodily
attitude make me blend in easily with locals. I feel more welcome on
the streets than in fine restaurants, marked out by my inability to
speak Portuguese than by anything else. I hear the warnings from others
too, and they are the sorts of things that New Yorkers would say to
visitors to their own city: the talk of “bad” neighborhoods, the kinds
of people—whole classes of people—that one should avoid, the
experiences the visitor couldn’t possibly be interested in except from
the safety of a tour bus going around the human zoo. But whether to
Harlem on a Sunday morning or to the favelas in an organized tour, “bad
neighborhood” is a code term for other things, a rhetorical move that
separates some imagined “us,” rich enough to travel, white enough to
see ourselves reflected in television melodramas and in advertising,
from “them,” whose presence at our travel destination is an
inconvenience.

Rio is by some distance the most
geographically spectacular city I have ever visited. Riding the cable
car up to the Pão d’Açúcar adds something genuinely new to my
experience of the world. The sea and its numerous inlets at the moment
the sun is setting behind Corcovado, the streets and houses hundreds of
meters below with their evening lights just coming on, and those lights
seen all together nestled in the undulating land like so many fresh
rivulets of lava, the massive monoliths scattered in the bay, and all
of this viewed from the great height we crested in a nineteenth-century
contraption: it was an awesome rush of sensation, an unanticipated
seduction of the eye, fairy-tale stuff. The gneiss monoliths were
extruded in ancient times when the continent that is now South America
sheared itself away from Gondwanaland. How beautiful it all looks at
dusk from the mountain named for the shape of the tins at sugar
refineries. The shape of the coast created calm bays, calm bays are
ideal ports, ports build great cities, and Rio de Janeiro became the
entry and exit into one of the world’s great expanses of wealth: sugar,
mines for precious and semi-precious stones, and slaves.

In
the Lapa district of the city, I meet a man who is selling “African”
things at a street fair. He is Sengalese, short and with delicate
features. I ask him how much some woven Islamic caps cost and see, in
his bright eyes, a flicker of recognition: he responds in English, and
immediately becomes curious about me, where I’m from, what my name is.
His name is El-Hadj, and he tells me he has been in Rio for twelve
years. He speaks English well, with a considered tone. “It’s a very
difficult country,” he says, unprompted. “They are very hard on blacks
here. Things are difficult if you are black.” For Brazilian blacks, or
for Africans? “Both. But harder if you are Brazilian. I am an African.
I know my rights”—I am struck by this usage of rights, which sounds
rather American to me—“but these Brazilians, it is so sad, you know.
After five-hundred years…” He taps his head.

El Hadj
imports the goods from Dakar—trinkets, figurines, printed cloth, and
hand-woven material—for sale in Rio, but his real work, he says, is
that he is a journalist He is just trying to earn some money on the
side to do his master’s degree in Brazil. He has a calm and calming
presence, with none of the tense energy or obvious fatigue of some of
the brothers who do this street trade. He still writes, for French
language outlets, some of which are published in Senegal.

“The
slavery is not over, you see. The blacks here try to be close to
Africa. I think they are closer to Africa than those in America. In
some ways, they are more connected to African culture. Because that is
our problem as blacks, you see, we have surrendered our culture, the
good things in our culture. Not all of it is good, but we should not
give up the good things. This is our biggest problem. But Brazilian
blacks…” Again, he taps his head. “And the whites in this country,
forget it, they will give the blacks no chance.”

“What about you? Do you move around freely?”

“Yes,
sometimes, when I enter a nice mall, they really look at me strangely,
you know. What is this guy doing here?” I tell him I have experienced
the same. He said, “But it is a good country, a very good country. The
food, the culture. I like Brazil, even though it is difficult. The
women are beautiful.”

He has to attend to one customer,
then others come to join her, black Brazilians, dressed in white. Their
affect is like that of the Afrocentric blacks in Brooklyn. The women
begin to admire bales of El Hadj’s wax-print cloth, and I leave him.

The
place at which we arrive after crossing the world is a surprising
version of home. It is home not in the far-fetched and marvelous view
from the mountain, but in the street-level, the bankers, the maids, the
internet service, the electrical grid, the supermarkets, the unctuous
waiters, the video games, the question marks over the cab drivers, the
schools and churches, the clean bathrooms, the dirty politics, the
traffic jams, the little pockets of “authentic culture,” the noise from
kindergartens at midday, the translated American bestsellers, Celine
Dion on the radio, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on the television,
the bored police officers with their brooding firearms, the indifferent
water pressure from the showers, the sports pennants hanging from
windows, the adults dressed like toddlers on game-day, the beer, the
wine, the graffiti, the transvestites, the auto-repair shops, the
gas-stations, the cowboys, the cowhands, the hospitals, and the
cemeteries.

What has us setting off to distant
destinations in the first place? Perhaps “us” is wrong and travel
writing, and travel thought, ought to begin in the singular, in some
acknowledgement of the “I” that speaks. I am Yoruba, and in this
country, of all the places outside Nigeria, the Yoruba heritage is
visible. The orixas of the northeast of Brazil, are the orishas of the
southwest of Nigeria. Xango is Shango, Exu is Esu, Yemanja is Yemoja,
Ogu is Ogun, and Obatala is unchanged. The gods are all here, the
language itself survives in ritual, and Yoruba drumming has found its
way into the samba and, greatly decelerated, into bossa nova. Farofa is
garri, the sweet and sour flour of the cassava plant, a staple food of
Yorubas on both sides of the Atlantic. In the lifetime of my
great-grandparents, slaves were still arriving in Brazil from
Yorubaland. In the same generation and later, there were those who
returned after slavery in Brazil. Names like Pereira, da Silva, and da
Costa survive, and those families became important, particularly in
Lagos. The architectural innovations the Afro-Brazilians brought back
to Lagos, Abeokuta and surrounding towns, the stucco facades, the
two-story buildings, mark those places to this day. But none of this
means an easy delight for me, a Yoruba man visiting Brazil. It suggests
only that this country is the site of some trauma to which I am
related, a trauma the memory of which catches me at sudden moments.

I’m
writing these words Tijuca, a working-class neighborhood of Rio, on a
rainy afternoon, and there’s a white cloud sitting on a green mountain
in the distance. The cloud is so densely white that it appears to be
just as substantial as the forested mountain itself. I am reading
Machado de Assis’ masterpiece “Epitaph of a Small Winner,” which is
itself set in Tijuca, a wry book, a funny and humane examination of
cynicism in Rio’s upper classes, written by a black man when slavery
was still legal here. I remember—this an overstatement, but it feels
right—I remember the things suffered here by Africans. It is strange to
think I would have understood the pleas at the whipping post, that it
would have been in my own language, the language of my people—my people
sold off into slavery by my people. A blood knot ties each of us to
ancient acts of violence. I am unhappy and at home.

But
in writing all this, what I exclude is a proper sense of the pleasure
of travel, and the intense pleasure of traveling to this particular
place. I hate cheery travel writing, but I feel I have overcorrected in
the other direction.

Edivaldo Soares is a heteronym for Teju Cole. All photographs copyright 2010 by Teju Cole; these and others may be viewed at his Flickr portfolio.

Yesterday I spent a rare day by myself, and it was as beautiful a day as we ever have here. I began in the garden, as the sun had just come over the fence to open the morning glories, talking to a friend whose husband is in a nursing home. He has Parkinson's, she brought him home the previous night for the evening, she is very strong but her eyes were full of tears as she told me about his decline, his anger, their sadness, and touched just briefly on her own isolation. Who is taking care of you, besides les fleurs, I asked her. Myself, she said, with that kind of smile that shows the warmth behind the stoicism. I have friends. But it is a hard thing to share.

And then I cycled up to the studio, where I am now, past another centre de readaptation where the staff, in white, sat smoking and talking in the sun before their shifts began; past an old woman talking to a squirrel that was eating nuts at the base of a tree.
I'm glad I don't have to face all this quite yet. Surrounded by paints and colors, with fresh coffee, and the piano, I was content

Today, our choir season began. It was good to see everyone,and even better to be making music together again. No melancholy at all. The 4:00 Evensong was devoted to music by the English Romantic composer Charles Villiers Stanford (he was actually Irish by birth), and I'll leave you with this recording of the Magnificat from his Service in C (accompanied by a bizarre and mostly-dreadful collection of paintings of Mary and the annunciation: shut your eyes and listen.)  It is, as you'll hear, what we call "a big sing." As one of only four sopranos in our choir of 25 or so today, I can vouch for that – by the end of the service I felt like I had a had an aerobic workout as well as a vocal one. I'm glad there were two pros on either side of me, better able to belt out one high G after another than I am! But it was fun.

http://www.youtube.com/v/90g_Zm68U-Y?fs=1&hl=en_US

*The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, by Jose Saramago

It's fine, I said, glancing again at my watch, I'm enjoying my book. I had reached an important point — where Ricardo lays his hand on the arm of Lydia, the hotel chambermaid, for several moments too long, and she leaves the room, the teacups on the breakfast tray trembling along with her hands — when the office door opened and a young man came in, carrying two small white cardboard boxes. Each had type on its sides, inscribed along a curve with a tooth at each end: "We Deliver Smiles."

My appointment began and proceeded smoothly; we laughed and talked as usual in-between ratchetings and filings and tap tap taps on the red film that showed what needed to be adjusted in my bite to accommodate the new tooth. There was a CD playing in the background: first Mozart, then Arabic music, the faintly African rhythms. What is this? I finally asked, when the reedy nasal sound of a Turkish ney broke into a woman's voice in full aria-flight, and I couldn't keep from laughing. He asked the assistant to turn the volume up and laughed too; we both sang snatches along with the singer. It's an obscure disk from France, he said. Some crazy guy who's combined Mozart with middle eastern and African music, but it somehow works. It does something different to your brain – you know, if music is supposed to free our minds to imagine places and scenes, this takes me somewhere entirely new. I feel like I'm in… a souk somewhere. While with western music I'm often bored, I love it but I've heard it so much, it's predictable. And your brain is used to it so it doesn't take you anywhere, I said. That's why I like performing contemporary music, I have to think harder.

We spoke of his daughter, who I'd met recently, she's torn between the violin and chemistry; and about books, and politics; I told him about our recent trip to the U.S. He told me he'd hurt his back at the gym, overdoing it. Listen he said, laughing again –the Requiem with Arabic drumming – fou fou fou. Then at one point I said –I've started painting again. Good for you! he said. How does it feel? It feels good, I said, shrugging. It's different than before. I have no idea now exactly what I want to be doing or where I'm going with it, but that's OK. I'm experimenting. Enjoying it.

It doesn't matter, he said, nodding, and pressing the glued crown into its final destination with his thumb. At this point it's the journey and the process that are more important than the result. He paused, and then grinned. We know that, he added, widening his eyes behind his round glasses, because now we're mature.

La chute Montmorency, oil,  (click for larger image)

This past week, writing about Faulkner with Peter in the evenings, I was also working during the afternoon on my painting. Today, after some fine-tuning, I decided it was done enough for now, and the most productive thing is to go on to something different.

I've been amazed how helpful it is to take photos not only of the evolution of the ideas, but of the stages of the painting itself. This is all new for me, since when I was painting before I didn't have a digital camera! I'm glad to have a record of what was there before it got obliterated or changed. So here's a slideshow of the whole process:

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

This exploration and eventual painting have taught me a great deal, and although I'm not satisfied with the result, of course, and it's far from where I hope to go, I'm well aware that it represents a big leap. I can see some of my confusion and hanging-on to old ways in the painting itself, but that's good, because it illuminates the direction I need to go. It's hard to let go of some of the comforting conventions of realism — atmospheric perspective, for instance, or realistic shapes as opposed to stylized or abstracted ones, or flat planes of color rather than modeling — and jump off into a scene of my own creation, trusting my sense of color, form, composition. When I stopped painting, before, I had gone much further in that direction in my watercolors than in oils, where for some reason the medium seemed to demand a closer connection with what I saw in front of me, with what was real.

Last night I was studying Peter Khoroche's excellent book on the work of Ivon Hitchins, recommended to me by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and saw a quote from Hitchins, one of the foremost British landscape painters of the twentieth century, that said something like, "I usually know what I want to do in a particular painting, but have no idea when I start of how to do it." I'm not sure he was being completely honest there, but it was a heartening thing to read those words from a master.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a new book on the Great Migration of six million African-Americans who left the South between 1910 and 1970. This link is to a review, "Freedom Trains" in the New York Times.

"Scant Effort in Progress over Racial Killings," an article from August 23, 2010, about the non-prosecution of murderers of blacks during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The 40-year statute of limitations is running out on most of these cases, but the FBI has done little.

Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America 2009, a report from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. This report includes sections on hate crimes against African-Americans; Hispanics; Jews; Asian Pacific Americans; Arab Americans, Muslims and Sikhs; Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals; Individuals with Disabilities; Women; and Juveniles. (Downloadable .pdf, or view online by section)

Publications and resources on Hate and Ethnoviolence, from Political  Research Associates (PRA), a progressive think tank.