Who Is A Nigger?

This post is in relation to the Gender and Domination course in OOPS. In 1986, civil rights hero and activist, Bayard Rustin, gave a speech called “The New Niggers Are Gays”. In this speech Rustin stated that the barometer of social change is no longer related to African-Americans since African-Americans have ...
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Who Is A Nigger?

#BlackLivesMatter and #Fightfor15

Building movements for racial and economic justice

It may be that in 20 or 30 years we will look back to 2015 as the year that things really began to change in the U.S. This was the year we saw the intersection of the movement for higher wages and Black Lives Matter really begin to ...

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#BlackLivesMatter and #Fightfor15

Of Honor and Despair in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt on Stefan Zweig

In 1943, with confirmation of the Nazis’ implementation of what the ossified bureaucratic language called Endlösung (the final solution) -- the extermination of all European Jews -- Hannah Arendt published an essay in the émigré journal Aufbau (printed in New York) on Stefan Zweig and the bygone world of yesterday, ...

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Of Honor and Despair in Dark Times

Solidarity with Muslim Women: A Personal Letter

Asifa Quraishi-Landes, Associate Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin, sent the following e-mail to her colleagues on December 3, 2015. It was subsequently circulated through her network, resulting in Nancy Fraser bringing it to our attention. We publish it in solidarity with Asifa Quraishi-Landes and "visibly Muslim Women." -JG Hi UW ...
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Solidarity with Muslim Women: A Personal Letter

The Disability Paradox

Further thoughts on inequality, disability, and the imaginal

Do you have a disability? Do you want to work? This seemingly innocent pairing of questions should immediately raise a red flag, for it is technically oxymoronic: in the United States, the disabled, by definition, are those who cannot work, at least in any significant sense. Granted, ...

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Invisible Privilege, Unspoken Racism

From street transactions to the NYSED disability campaign

I spent most of my summer on the Italian coast, in the little town where I was born, as I do almost every year. The difference, this time, was that I had not been back to my home country for a whole year. This gave me some sort of a ...

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The (de)Construction of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Latinos respond to Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s derisive statements about Mexican immigrants have mobilized a large portion of the Latino community in the United States. Faced with the same old accusations that Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug-dealers, or rapists, businesses and public figures such as Univision, NBC, ESPN, NASCAR, Macy’s, chefs Jose Andres and Geoffrey ...

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The (de)Construction of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Who Bankrolled Jim Crow?

Global capital and American segregation

Look no further than American suburbs to find some of the starkest legacies of Jim Crow. Segregated through redlining and disproportionately benefiting from state subsidies, American suburbs fixed the geography of white supremacy. But when we look at American suburbia, we must also look beyond America’s borders. It ...

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And Yet It is Round!

Untimely thoughts on Europe, Migration, and the State

Untimely thoughts on Europe, Migration, and the State

As I do every year, I have spent most of this summer on the Italian coast, in the region around the Gulf of Poets. This summer, as soon as I put my head underwater, I am struck by the beauty of the sea: the ...

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