Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi

A Jo Freeman Review of ‘Won Over’

When I was working in Mississippi for SCLC in 1966, I would not have believed that any of the young white men I saw on the streets (mostly harassing us) would ever reject white supremacy. They appeared as dedicated to its domination as sports fans are to their clubs. William Alsup writes that ...
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Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi

The African American Poet as Historian

Poets do history — just not in the way that historians conceive of it

What is history? Not the past, but the creation of “history,” the writing of history, the teaching of history? Is it only something someone formally trained as a historian can do, even though scholars of literature and African American studies, and high school teachers and writers engage with the past, ...
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The African American Poet as Historian

Can Behavior Genetics Free Itself From Racial Supremacy?

An excerpt from “Misbehaving Science”

Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. In Misbehaving Science, Aaron Panofsky traces the field of behavior genetics back to its ...
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Can Behavior Genetics Free Itself From Racial Supremacy?

What To Do About Racial Supremacy in Behavior Genetics?

An interview with Aaron Panofsky

Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. In Misbehaving Science, Aaron Panofsky traces the field of behavior genetics back to its ...
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What To Do About Racial Supremacy in Behavior Genetics?

Banned for Life – from Mississippi

Review of Brenda Travis, written with John Obee

At age 17 Brenda Travis was banned from the state of Mississippi, or so she was told. Forced to leave family and friends behind because she got involved in the civil rights movement she spent most of her life someplace else, but always felt like an exile. Brenda was just 16 ...
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Banned for Life – from Mississippi

Reconsidering the History of Race through Peyote

How categories of belonging are made in Mexico

Loyalties begin with a sense of belonging, a sense of who is on the inside and who is on the outside. I suppose that historians almost invariably interrogate notions of loyalty as we imagine our historical subjects; how they experienced their connections and obligations, and how this in turned shaped ...
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Reconsidering the History of Race through Peyote

All of a Sudden

Reflections from the classroom of Sekou Sundiata

I arrived to class on Monday, November 27th, 2006 anxious and ready to be frustrated once again. I had ambivalent feelings about the course. Of all my courses at Eugene Lang College, this “America Project” class was the most culturally diverse. Where I was usually the lone black male student, ...
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All of a Sudden

Crusader Without Violence 60 Years Later

The first biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is reissued

Lawrence D. Reddick was a history professor at Alabama State College — the state school for blacks — when the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence in 1955-56. They had known each other casually in Atlanta; both had moved to Montgomery to accept jobs only recently. On ...
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Crusader Without Violence 60 Years Later

Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

An interview with poet Cheryl Clarke about the 1963 March on Washington

In August 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, I had the opportunity to interview African-American feminist and lesbian Cheryl Clarke about her participation in the March on Washington. A poet, essayist and literary critic, Cheryl has been an activist, a teacher and an artist for her entire ...
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Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

Confronting the U.S. Census as a Weapon of White Supremacy

The race question has been crucial to civil rights, but it also perpetuates racism

On March 26, 2018, the Trump administration announced that it would add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Since then, many serious objections have been raised, highlighted through multiple lawsuits. Some are concerned that such a question will cause an undercount, others that it will result in further marginalization of immigrants, less ...
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Confronting the U.S. Census as a Weapon of White Supremacy

UNC-Chapel Hill Proposes to Raise Millions to Preserve Silent Sam

This doesn’t solve the problem: and the money could go to pay grad students a living wage

On the night of December 8, after proctoring the final exam for the undergraduate course I teach, I got the phone call that I simultaneously needed and dreaded. “What are your thoughts on participation?” my co-instructor asked. “I have so many overlapping concerns that I don’t know where to begin!” I exclaimed. ...
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UNC-Chapel Hill Proposes to Raise Millions to Preserve Silent Sam

What Shakespeare Can Tell Us About School Shootings

In the film O, a 1999 adaptation of Othello, toxic masculinity is at the root of violence

In 1998, five shootings took place on school campuses in the United States. So far in 2018, there have been more than sixty-five. Over the last few decades, the frequency of violence in schools has increased exponentially. As a society, we have struggled to understand the nature of such violence and ...
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What Shakespeare Can Tell Us About School Shootings