Race Archives - Page 9 of 29

Activism

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

Now everywhere quoted, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” serves as a thoughtful shorthand for understanding the jagged edge of today’s unrest. But even in Dr. King’s time, it was not particularly radical wisdom. In 1967, the Kerner Commission was tasked by ...

Activism

An American Reckoning

The fire this time

June 4, 2020 • by Deva Woodly

In 1844, James Russell Lowell penned the anti-slavery poem “The Present Crisis” in response to the political tumult leading up to the Civil War. Inspired by Lowell’s poem, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called its official magazine The Crisis, with W. E. B. Du Bois as ...

Activism

What Is to Be Done?

Three scholars of democracy respond to the protests

June 4, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia

I believe this extraordinary nationwide mobilization is the best answer possible to the Democrats who engineered the destruction of the Sanders primary campaign -- I mean Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, James Carville, James Clyburn, Pete Buttigieg, and the innumerable reporters and media “experts” who from the beginning insisted ...

Activism

The Anti-Racist Uprising in Brooklyn

A report from the streets

June 3, 2020 • by Natasha Lennard

Since March, sirens have become a consistent soundtrack where I live in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. For weeks, this was the sound of ambulances, ushering thousands to nearby hospitals from the predominantly African American area, hard hit by the pandemic. But in recent days, the sirens have carried a different meaning. Night ...

Race

Killer Mike on the Murder of George Floyd

The Atlanta rapper addresses his community

June 1, 2020 • by Killer Mike

On Saturday, May 29, the rapper Killer Mike, best known for his work with the duo Run the Jewels, joined the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, at a televised press conference. Killer Mike usually appears in a choreographed setting, like the official music videos for Run the Jewels tracks like ...

Activism

In the Face of Terror

A statement in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd

June 1, 2020 • by Dwight A. McBride

I, like so many others, am both hurt and angered by the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. And as a Black American, this is also deeply personal for me. To be shown repeatedly that we have no guarantee of safety even in the course of ...

Race

Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal

How pious white anti-racism can contribute to racist behavior

May 29, 2020 • by Musa al-Gharbi

It is unclear what the appropriate consequences for something like this should be, given how dire the consequences of her actions could have been (as recent events in Minneapolis sadly confirm). However, Ms. Cooper has already paid a high price for her transgression: She has been publicly shamed and terminated ...

Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal

Interviews

Hope, Revolution, and Survival

An interview with Morgan Parker

May 11, 2020 • by Masha Shollar and Morgan Parker

Masha Shollar [MS]: You’ve said that you trick yourself into writing by making yourself laugh. This collection is so intense and not one I would automatically think of as humorous, even though poems like “Matt” and “Brooklyn” for instance are, in ways, very funny. But they still had these dark ...

Public Health

How Dog-Whistle Racism Is Sabotaging the Postal Service

And threatening to gut the Black middle class

May 7, 2020 • by Amy Traub

Since Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General by the Continental Congress in 1775, the United States Postal Service has survived wars, depressions, natural disasters, and crises of all kinds. But it may not survive Donald Trump. The Postal Service faces a $13 billion revenue loss this fiscal year alone, as Americans send fewer letters and packages in ...

How Dog-Whistle Racism Is Sabotaging the Postal Service

Interviews

When Anthropology Overturned a Way of Seeing the World

An interview with Charles King

April 24, 2020 • by Charles King and Zach Schwab

Zach Schwab [ZS]: In the Acknowledgements section of this book you attribute the original inspiration behind it to a series of conversations that you had with your wife. I was wondering if you could elaborate on how that took place, and maybe the moment when you first realized that this ...

When Anthropology Overturned a Way of Seeing the World

History

Challenging the Perception of the Wayward Girl

An interview with Saidiya Hartman

April 21, 2020 • by Saidiya Hartman and Yannise Jean

Yannise Jean [YJ]: For this book, you took a different approach by structuring it like a fictional narrative. I think this structure really helps the reader get into the character's heads. Was this your intention during the outlining stages of your book? Saidiya Hartman [SH]: I write nonfiction. As I started to write ...

Challenging the Perception of the Wayward Girl

Gender

Looking for the Original “Welfare Queen”

An Interview With Josh Levin

March 17, 2020 • by Josh Levin and Lauren Browne

The following interview, with Josh Levin the 2020 award winner for biography, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In his critically acclaimed book The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, Josh Levin, national editor at Slate, introduces us to Linda Taylor, ...