Healing through a Black Mother’s Love

From Intergenerational Trauma to Accountability and Resilience

Every year as Mother’s Day approaches, we are surrounded by gifts to purchase for the person who birthed us. We sift through cards that read things like “a mother’s unconditional love,” “thank you for always supporting me,” and “you’re the world’s best mom.” This is always a tough time of ...
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Healing through a Black Mother’s Love

The Only One

Charley Pride, Darius Rucker, and the Colorblind Narrative in American Country Music

In 1987, country music novelty singer O.B. McClinton released “The Only One” which explored the complexity of being a black country music artist. The song told the story of McClinton traveling to a country bar to sing, only to be questioned for being a black artist in a genre dominated ...
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The Only One

Black Aesthetic/Aesthetic Black

Race, Space, and the Possibilities of Becoming

How do we recognize blackness? Is it something we feel? According to recent data, medical professionals believe we don’t feel pain at the same intensity as white people, and therefore are administered less pain medication. Is it something we taste? Black culinary traditions are rooted in history and experience, but only a few ...
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Black Aesthetic/Aesthetic Black

The Charlottesville Syllabus

Confronting the history and present of white supremacy in a college town

12 AUGUST 2017 The Charlottesville Syllabus is a resource created by the Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation to be used to educate readers about the long history of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. While the resources selected and summaries written are by UVA graduate students, the Syllabus is not sanctioned by ...
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The Charlottesville Syllabus

The Racism of Climate Denial

Creating uncertainty about evidence is an injustice

Climate justice demands we acknowledge that the fossil-fuel economy distributes its costs unequally across racial lines. For example, race, not poverty, is correlated with exposure to PM 2.5, a health-damaging particle produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change itself, the planetary effect of fossil-fuel consumption, also affects people unequally ...
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The Racism of Climate Denial

Trump’s Bottling of Old Wine

Can we finally lose our bipartisan taste for workfare?

It is tempting to see President Trump’s executive order directing his agencies to find ways to require work as a condition for receiving means-tested benefits as another example of his outsized callousness. By casting all means-tested aid programs as “welfare,” Trump’s executive order supersizes “workfare” by linking benefits to work. There are ...
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Trump’s Bottling of Old Wine

Mass Shooting and the Spectacle of Whiteness

Lynching as spectacle 

Fredric Jameson once noted that déjà vu is possible for an experience one has never had: postmodernism is an amnesia of eternal returns. I remember when I witnessed the unfolding of the Columbine massacre on CNN – the event that culturally marked the beginning of an era of school shootings – it ...
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Mass Shooting and the Spectacle of Whiteness

Revisiting Ta-Nehisi Coates on White Supremacy

The Status of Hope in America

The American fear of uncertainty is one that the people living within her belly strive to terminate through pragmatism, which promises quantifiable and “progressive” results. The entire “American Dream” rests on the fundamental faith that our institutions and famous (infamous we might argue) social slogan instills into each American heart: ...
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Revisiting Ta-Nehisi Coates on White Supremacy

Older Black Workers Face More Risk in Economic Downturns

March 2018 Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today reported a 3.2% unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older in March, a rate unchanged since February. For decades, economists have documented that the racial gap in unemployment rates is widest at the depth of a recession and narrowest right before the economy goes into recession. In ...
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Older Black Workers Face More Risk in Economic Downturns

People Falling All Around Us

Why the killing of Marielle Franco?

On the night of the 14th of March, elected councilwoman for the city of Rio de Janeiro, Marielle Franco, was shot dead in her car while returning from an event dedicated to black women’s empowerment. Nine gunshots were fired against the car, four of which hit Marielle directly in the ...
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People Falling All Around Us

Black Insurgency, Anti-Racism, and the Student Mobilization Against Guns

The similarities and differences of these social movements

I have seen many comments on social media about the significant difference in how the emergence of the student mobilizations against gun violence has been greeted compared to the Black insurgency of Black Lives Matter. It is an important discussion to have because if these current mobilizations hope to grow into ...
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Black Insurgency, Anti-Racism, and the Student Mobilization Against Guns

A Primary Moral Position

Black feminism and self possession

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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A Primary Moral Position