A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...
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A Pencil For Your Land

One Karen’s Perspective on Our Whitewashed History

The attacks on critical race theory are only the latest chapter in the American fight against equality and justice

_____ Not so very long ago, when we were children, my fellow white Gen Xers and I learned a whitewashed American history. That recent history can not only help explain white parents’ defensiveness about the teaching of race today, but also reveal the need for today’s children to learn basic concepts ...
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One Karen’s Perspective on Our Whitewashed History

Murder, Marines, and the Mojave

On the 20th anniversary of its publication, author Deanne Stillman contemplates the repercussions of her much-discussed book, “Twentynine Palms”

_____ If you live in Southern California, odds are better than even that you’ve heard about Twentynine Palms. Deanne Stillman’s 2001 book examines the barbaric rape and murder of 15-year-old Mandi Scott and 20-year-old Rosalie Ortega in August 1991 by a Gulf War veteran. The murderer was stationed at the nearby ...
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Murder, Marines, and the Mojave

When Saying “I’m Sorry” Is Not Enough

The anatomy of an apology

_____ An apology has an essential value.   it enables the apologizer, the perpetrator of a transgression, to reclaim its moral character in the aftermath of the transgression. By apologizing, the perpetrator is attempting to reclaim its humanity, its place in the community of civilized individuals or institutions. In a real sense, ...
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When Saying “I’m Sorry” Is Not Enough

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

At last, a policeman is held accountable for murdering a Black American. But the process of imagining an end to lethal policing has only begun

_____ My greatest fear as I waited for the verdict in the George Floyd case yesterday was not that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin wasn’t going to be convicted of something. The prosecution had carefully left two back doors open for the jury, alternative charges that would have allowed the ...
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Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Why the Howling That New York’s Private Schools Have Been Taken Over By Critical Race Theory?

Claims that children are being harmed are a thin cover for returning to a world where white people don’t have to feel bad about racism

Late last week, Paul Rossi, a member of the mathematics faculty at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan, denounced the social justice and anti-racism program instituted by the school in 2020. Before writing this essay, published on Bari Weiss’s contrarian Substack, Common Sense, Rossi was already in hot water. By ...
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Why the Howling That New York’s Private Schools Have Been Taken Over By Critical Race Theory?

When Welfare Was a Route to Community Empowerment in Las Vegas

In 1971, Black women workers seized control of their own destiny—and won

_____ This month, Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a bill that seeks to address longstanding economic, educational, local government and health care needs that have become desperate during the pandemic. Even though it was missing key elements – a $15 federal minimum wage, and a lower cutoff for eligibility ...
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When Welfare Was a Route to Community Empowerment in Las Vegas

Deb Haaland Brings Experience and History to Biden’s Cabinet

Opportunities for justice abound as she takes the helm at a branch of government that has historically mishandled and cheated indigenous people

_____ In 1968 the National Indian Youth Council served as one of the organizers of the Native American contingent for the Poor People’s Campaign. This multi-racial coalition marched on Washington and, in a document penned by the “Committee of 100,” presented its list of demands. With regard to Indigenous Peoples in the ...
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Deb Haaland Brings Experience and History to Biden’s Cabinet

I Am a Man

As the nation looks for justice in the George Floyd murder, activists embrace the world Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned during the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike

_____ Martin Luther King encapsulated all that Black Americans demand and deserve from their country into one sentence: “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’” King spoke those words on April 3. 1968, during what is remembered as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, ...
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I Am a Man

Georgia On My Mind

The Democratic Party in Georgia has come a long way since the 1965 Voting Rights Act

“The concept of political equality...can mean only one thing—one person, one vote." ...

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Georgia On My Mind

How Black Women Fight for Our Democracy

A conversation about Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

A legal and cultural historian, Martha Jones has dedicated herself to telling the story of how Black Americans have shaped American democracy, even – or especially – when they were formally excluded from the democratic process itself.  Jones’s most recent contribution is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and ...
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How Black Women Fight for Our Democracy

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

By all measures we are living in an era defined by housing crises, a flood of human habitat destruction. The losses are both economic and environmental. Over 17 million people in 2018 alone were displaced from their homes because of climate change–associated disasters, according to the United Nations. Here in ...
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How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?