After Derby Day, a Note of Caution About Horses and “Races”
The irony is that racing bred race
The irony is that racing bred race...
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Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work
An excerpt from Elena Shih’s probing book
Commercial sex in Bangkok, broadcast through tourist networks, now links the city in many minds with human trafficking—following the global tendency to conflate all sex commerce with sex trafficking. ...
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Left on a Mountain to Die
An excerpt from Under the Naga Tail: The escape from the Cambodian Genocide
An excerpt of Under the Naga Tail, the memoir of a refugee who escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia....
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Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes
An excerpt of Interior Frontiers
This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...
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A Botany of Decolonization
An excerpt from Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change
Colonization is built into the very soil of New York....
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Everyone in the Pool? No—Not Everyone
A site for fun and competition, the swimming pool has its own civil rights history—one that is not yet resolved
When you think about desegregation, do you think about schools? Buses? Lunch counters? How about that most innocent, necessary, and often taken for granted of summer recreation spots for hot kids and their parents—the public pool?
Yet pools were, and are, a public facility, and because of that were segregated by ...
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How My Grandmother Ceased to Be African
How East African Asians have been written out of African history
And in the pre-independence era, a new racial politics emerged, one that has, for far too long, encapsulated much of East Africa’s postcolonial thought, in which families like ours were increasingly depicted as foreigners to a place that had long been our home....
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The Experiment
An excerpt from Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality
Steven Armstrong was the first to show up in Classroom No. 1O on the morning of Friday, April 5, 1968.
“Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven said as he slung his books on his desk. “They shot that King last night! Why’d they shoot that King?”
Steven was an alert, savvy kid. The son of ...
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The Implications of March 7, 1965
The history of Bloody Sunday and where we stand today
The story of March 7, 1965, in Selma is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed....
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The Color of Abolition
Linda Hirshman introduces her new book on Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman
I was looking for the mechanics of activism—the meetings, the speeches, the broadsides, the litigation—for my analysis. And Garrison and Douglass were both central to the mechanics of activism. Their alliance fueled critical years of the movement, and their breakup affected the direction of the movement profoundly. This was the ...
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There’s a Black Man Running Down My Street
When nice white neighbors criminalize a man for being Black and kill him it’s not just murder—it’s a lynching.
When is a murder not a murder? When it’s a lynching.
On November 24, 2021—the day before Thanksgiving—many Americans let out a collective breath of relief. In Brunswick, Georgia, a jury convicted Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan of murder for hunting down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, an ...
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Can We Talk about Race?
An award-winning journalist says yes—it isn’t easy, but everyone can learn to do it
Celeste Headlee, an award-winning journalist, professional speaker and author of We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter (Harper Wave, 2018), and Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving (Harmony, 2021) met (virtually) with Public Seminar editorial intern Gregory Coleman to discuss writing about the difficult conversations that need to happen ...
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