On Hate and Boycotts

How We Choose What We Believe

It took me about six months to start interacting with people I perceived as "white." It took me a lot longer to reflect on how I could so readily use the word hate. With time I realized it was because, where I came from, hating white people -- which mostly meant ...
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Language Matters

How do we teach classic literature if we cannot discuss offensive words?

Since the spring of 2016, I have taught a seminar in the New School’s MFA program on writing and literature as radical questioning. As I put the syllabus together, I sought out texts that would challenge our most basic assumptions (for instance, that a novel has a plot; an author’s work must ...
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Reproduction At The End Of Humanity

Refusing Apocalypse and Dismantling The Threat Of The New

My interest in this growing sense of reproductive unease has been nourished by research into the impact of housing insecurity on millennials’ intimate lives. Here, generational inequality generates feelings of thwartedness across a range of experiences -- romantic partnerships are doomed by the inability to leave a parental home, barriers ...
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A Letter from Hillsborough

A Modern Southern Fairy Tale

On the list of the endangered are people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, refugees, children, the elderly, and the disabled. Last month, in Hillsborough, North Carolina, once upon a time was now. *** Matthew Shepherd, a gay chocolatier, qualifies for a spot on the endangered list. These are tough times ...
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Further Thoughts on Antifa

Counter-Violence is not Self-Defense

On the one hand, my piece has generated some interesting discussions, the main point of contention of which centers on the question of whether “Antifa” is a form of self-defense in response to the presence of dangerous and armed racists. On the other hand, “antifascist” organizing continues apace in Bloomington. A rump market ...
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The Dilemma of Black Citizenship

Perpetual Partiality and Patriotism 

"I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”James Baldwin, Notes from a Native Son The concepts of universal equality and suffrage have historically provided the necessary openings for those who are not rich or white ...
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What’s Wrong with the ‘Great Awokening’?

White Liberals’ Racial Attitudes Aren’t Too Far Left, They’re Stuck within a Crude Identity Politics

According to center-left commentators, this Awokening is simply too extreme and, thus, threatening to the success of a broader progressive agenda -- whether in the 2020 presidential election or in local organizing efforts. To support this assertion, they claim that white liberals’ racial attitudes have moved so far left that ...
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Antifa Is Not a Terrorist Organization

But That Doesn’t Make It Good

Simultaneously, racism and white supremacism have assumed a new importance. President Donald Trump is a virulent racist and demagogue who consorts with white supremacists, praises them, gives them aid and comfort, and even includes them as high-ranking members of his campaign (Steve Bannon) and administration (Stephen Miller). The mass murder ...
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The New Queer

Aesthetics of the Esoteric Left and Virtual Materialisms

The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots inspired cultural actors in Berlin and elsewhere to take stock. June 2019 has seen Puqs in Love at Gorki theater, The Present is Not Enough at Hebbel am Ufer Theater (HAU), the Queer Alms conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and other events. I used the occasion to investigate contemporary 'Queer ...
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The New Queer

On Race and Repair

A Güero Reads Plato in Jerusalem

I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood with mostly Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan kids, along with a few from Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, and Korea. In some cases, their parents or grandparents had come as migrants to America, where they had been born, and in other cases they had themselves ...
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Anti-Latino Nativism, Ronald Reagan, and Sound Baths

Past Present Episode 192

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The mass shooter in El Paso deliberately targeted Latinos who he believed were “invading” Texas. Niki referred to Peter Brimelow’s 1996 book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Natalia cited Samuel Huntington’s Foreign Policy essay, “The Hispanic Challenge,” and historian Ruben Donato’s book, The Other ...
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