Race Archives - Page 12 of 33

Race

The Outcast State

Shakespeare’s Unlikely Connection to Black Subjectivity

June 18, 2019 • by Seven Richmond

Now that race is the hottest topic of discussion, Othello is everywhere, positioned as the Shakespeare on race. This past semester, while we were reading the play, there were no fewer than four different Othello adaptations nearby: Bill Rauch’s production at the American Reparatory Theater, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol’s Othello in the Seraglio, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and a ...

Feature

Learning to Hate Shakespeare

What are the implications of being engaged with Shakespeare at the expense of what could otherwise be regarded as a black or African authenticity?

June 17, 2019 • by Jordan Mubako

Looking at Literature syllabi across former British colonies, Shakespeare has persisted to this day. The recent syllabus from the West African Examinations Council (including countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) has Othello as a compulsory text, with Shakespeare granted equal status as “Non-African Drama” and “African Drama.” Paper 3 of the ...

Education

Accumulation by Education

White Property and Racialized Debt

June 14, 2019 • by Iyko Day

A key loophole that perpetuates both legal and illegal corruption is the outsized role that varsity sports play in the admissions process, widening the path to acceptance for predominantly white athletes in lacrosse, sailing, tennis, crew, water polo, and other “white sports.” Despite the perception that Black students are the face of ...

Education

Why Occidental College Revoked a 1929 Honorary Degree to White Supremacist Paul Popenoe

Confronting the legacy of eugenics in the United States and its ties to the founder of modern marriage counseling

June 13, 2019 • by Peter Dreier

In recent years, many colleges and universities have created task forces and programs to excavate their racist histories. These efforts explore their institutions’ financial ties to slavery; the racist views of some founders, faculty, and alumni; their admissions and hiring practices; and their evolving curriculum that, wittingly or unwittingly, reflected society’s white ...

Feature

Letter Two to Germany: Visiting Boston Under Trump

In March 2019, Berlin-based author Esther Dischereit observes the Academy Awards from Boston

June 11, 2019 • by Esther Dischereit

This article was originally published in German in Deutschlandfunk Kultur on March 20, 2019. It is reprinted with the kind permission of Deutschlandfunk Kultur. --- Today I was awakened by the sound of a snow shovel. A path had been cleared below on Harvard Street, which goes past the famous Harvard Campus. Whoever ...

Feature

White Men Running (For President)

The DNC’s nostalgic embrace of familiar, and obsolete, white male leadership

May 28, 2019 • by Aaron Landsman

“Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy.” Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” In this 2020 Democratic primary reality TV season, Biden, O’Rourke, Buttigieg, and Sanders all seem to be performing different facets of a kind of idealized white male type. ...

Education

Women of Color Resisting Hegemony in the Academy

An interview with Manya C. Whitaker and Eric A. Grollman

May 24, 2019 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso, Marianna Poyares, Manya C. Whitaker and Eric Grollman

Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerability and Resistance demonstrates how to build collective co-created spaces for “speaking up, speaking against, calling out and calling in”, to make visible the experiences and voices of women of color in academia, and the struggle for infrastructures of inclusion and justice at the ...

Women of Color Resisting Hegemony in the Academy

Education

Undocumented in the Ivory Tower

An excerpt from “Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics”

May 23, 2019 • by Alessandra Bazo Vienrich

Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerability and Resistance documents the lived experiences of women of color academics who have leveraged their professional positions to challenge the status quo in their scholarship, teaching, service, activism, and leadership. By presenting reflexive work from various vantage points within and outside of the ...

Feature

Electability, Caster Semenya, and Rachel Held Evans

Past Present Episode 179

May 14, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia discuss the concept of “electability,” the gender policing of South African runner Caster Semenya, and the legacy of Christian writer Rachel Held Evans. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: With over 20 Democratic candidates in the running, “ electability” is ...

Electability, Caster Semenya, and Rachel Held Evans

Feature

On These Truths

History can’t save the world. It can’t even save democracy. But it can offer hope.

May 9, 2019 • by Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore's response was originally published on May 9 2019. The day I sat down to write this essay I got an email from a man in South Carolina. He’d been studying for his U.S. citizenship exam and he’d decided to read my book, These Truths: A History of The United States, ...

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The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

May 9, 2019 • by Alberto Toscano

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...

Feature

Are American Indians Part of a United States National History?

This land didn’t just used to belong to indigenous nations — it still does

May 7, 2019 • by Malinda Maynor Lowery

This essay was originally published on May 8 2019. I assume I was invited to participate because my field of study is American Indian history, and this book does not cover a lot of American Indian history. So my role here is to talk about how we could and should deal ...