Black History Month
From TNC: And I wonder if the problem of African-American History is that it so coldly and cruelly counters the American narrative. I have spent the past two decades thinking about that history and...
View ArticleSummer Reading
Law enforcement: a land of thin accountability. “Failing” schools: the narrow view of a single metric. We are not post-racist; we are just a more sophisticated form of it.
View ArticleStructures of (Surfing’s) Oppression
This article is both an interesting glimpse into Hawaiian (and therefore, American imperialist) history, and also an excellent demonstration of the idea that anything can be politically significant;...
View ArticleMorning in My America
First, some background reading on voting in America: how we came to have a secret ballot and why, despite the protestations of those who claim voting is an essentially useless act, it actually matters...
View ArticleHappy Holidays
No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up. -TNC
View ArticleWhiteness, Blackness, & The Spaces In Between
Marco Rubio is being upheld — water-bottle-gaffes aside — as the new face of the Republican party, taking the baton from Bobby Jindal as the right-wing’s token person of color. Per this Colorlines...
View ArticleThe Stubborn Persistence of White Supremacy
White supremacy is a tricky concept to talk about, because for most people it calls to mind very specific images: plantations, burning crosses, lynchings, the Klan. But white supremacy isn’t just...
View ArticleBeing Better People
Yesterday I wrote about how our penchant for judgment precludes the formation of a just society; when we formulate our responses to systemic injustice in terms of personal responsibility we sabotage...
View ArticleDuly Noted
Couple points of interest: - Legislative misuse of graphics can be entertaining. - How the NSA surveillance program fits into a post-9/11 authoritarian paradigm. - Documenting gun violence:...
View ArticleDear Racists: You Are Not As Smart As You Think You Are
I wrote a short essay about race and ethnicity in the George Zimmerman trial. It was published on Salon. If you have not read it yet, I encourage you to do so, both because the rest of this post will...
View ArticleThis Is Black Hoodie Rap
A textual collage exploring inspiration, technology, and identity. On Wednesday night I finally saw “Fruitvale Station” (not out in Australia, at least not yet). A phenomenal film; an imperfect one,...
View ArticleHateMailBag
So it turns out the best part about writing about race on the Internet is the slow trickle of racist email never goes away! While I am happy to ignore the comments and the tweets, I feel obligated to...
View ArticleThe Fiction of Affirmative Action
..our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil...
View ArticleOn SF, From London
I had plans to write an epic post about the Google bus situation and the social divides and false meritocracy of the tech economy (titled “Class: Warfare, Bus Fare, & What is Fair?”) — but then...
View ArticleThe World Around Us
Urging African-Americans to become superhuman is great advice if you are concerned with creating extraordinary individuals. It is terrible advice if you are concerned with creating an equitable...
View ArticleThe Inheritance of Plunder
Sometimes facts that we’ve known for a long while can become remixed to have new meaning — an “aha” moment, such as it is, and I had one earlier today while watching the film “The Corporation”*. The...
View ArticleEntering Prejudice
The desolate truth was that the Colonel was extremely stupid, and it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality,...
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