Is Equality Enough?

Black feminist views of justice

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...
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Is Equality Enough?

Public Seminar is LIVE from #CPAC2018

Thursday, February 22 2018

3:20 PM: Ted Cruz is absolutely running for President in 2020. Cruz ran onto the stage with that candidate look, waving and spreading his arms wide to make himself look bigger than he is. "I love CPAC!" he shouted, and for the first time since I entered the press pen, the conversation ...
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Public Seminar is LIVE from #CPAC2018

After the Parkland Massacre, What?

A conversation between left and right about gun control

Joseph Castillo and I met in the fall of 1976 as first year students at Yale University. He was from the southwest, I was from the Northeast; he was a science major, and I was an English major. Joe became an engineer and entrepreneur and I became a history professor, ...
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After the Parkland Massacre, What?

Blackness, Gender, and the Non-normative

A Response to Christopher Lebron’s The Making of Black Lives Matter

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...
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Blackness, Gender, and the Non-normative

Multiple and Interlocking

Black Lives Matter as the lens through which a system is made clear

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...
Read More
Multiple and Interlocking

Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

An open letter

In the opinion of the Helsinki Committee in Poland, the two years since November 2015 have brought the greatest number of challenges and threats to human rights and freedoms of the entire post-1989 period. The Committee, as a civic initiative monitoring the violation of rights and fundamental freedoms since 1983, examines ...
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Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

What Makes Something New Today? 

On the compulsion to innovate

Given our prejudice towards innovation, everything labeled as “new” captures our interest with the promise of genuine improvement. But are new politicians, technological discoveries, and works of art necessarily better than previous ones? As we enter 2018 we recall last year’s breakthroughs as improvements in politics, technology, and art. It is ...
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What Makes Something New Today? 

Moanin’

On gun violence in the United States

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington There was another school shooting this past week. This one was at a high school in Parkland, Florida. A disgruntled and clearly disturbed 19-year-old former student arrived on school grounds with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, entered ...
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Moanin’

Eminem vs. Trump

The political importance of the artist

I was in Chicago with my son, visiting colleges, and he was listening to the new Eminem album while he was working out in the hotel gym. He told me that he thought the album was great, but that he was not sure if he agreed with Eminem using his ...
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Eminem vs. Trump

I Love Compromise, But…

Compromise as a Democratic Necessity or as Democracy’s Corruption?

Yet, I also know that there is a second meaning to the word compromise, that compromise can be understood as the abandonment of principle, often insuring the continuation of a pressing problem, even making matters worse. Think of the compromises about slavery leading up to the American Civil War. Compromise ...
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I Love Compromise, But…