Race Archives - Page 15 of 33

Education

All of a Sudden

Reflections from the classroom of Sekou Sundiata

January 25, 2019 • by Brian Lewis

I arrived to class on Monday, November 27th, 2006 anxious and ready to be frustrated once again. I had ambivalent feelings about the course. Of all my courses at Eugene Lang College, this “America Project” class was the most culturally diverse. Where I was usually the lone black male student, ...

The Right

How I Knew the #CovingtonBoys Video Was Clickbait

And why you should care that it is

January 24, 2019 • by Claire Potter

I watched it through, aware of the retweet widget turning over rapidly. It was going viral. Because I did not really understand what the video meant to the thousands sharing it, I clicked on the response widget on the far left to look at comments. I learned Sandmann and Phillips’ names; ...

How I Knew the #CovingtonBoys Video Was Clickbait

Feature

Gillette’s New Ad, Rep. Steve King, and Cursive’s Decline

Past Present Episode 163

January 22, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Gillette released a new ad taking aim at “toxic masculinity.” Natalia recommended historian Gail Bederman’s book Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Race and Gender in the United States, 1880-1917 and a Twitter thread she compiled of relevant historical images. Neil referred to his HuffPost piece on the campaign’s ...

Gillette’s New Ad, Rep. Steve King, and Cursive’s Decline

Blue Monday

Thoughts on Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham, and Fractious Unity

Lessons from the civil rights movement for today’s political debates

January 21, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues.” - Duke Ellington Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a classic of American political thought and of American literature more generally. I’ve taught it countless times in my almost four decades of teaching political ...

Thoughts on Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham, and Fractious Unity

Feature

Crusader Without Violence 60 Years Later

The first biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is reissued

January 21, 2019 • by Jo Freeman

Lawrence D. Reddick was a history professor at Alabama State College — the state school for blacks — when the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence in 1955-56. They had known each other casually in Atlanta; both had moved to Montgomery to accept jobs only recently. On ...

Crusader Without Violence 60 Years Later

Feature

Celebrating Gloria Steinem

We All Stand on Her Shoulders

January 2, 2019 • by Peter Dreier

Gloria Steinem, the best-known face of second wave feminism, will turn 85 in March. And while it’s a persistent temptation in our youth-obsessed America to pay more attention to the young than the old, Steinem has not been forgotten. In fact, a new play about Steinem, “Gloria: A Life,” opened ...

Feature

Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

An interview with poet Cheryl Clarke about the 1963 March on Washington

December 29, 2018 • by Claire Potter

In August 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, I had the opportunity to interview African-American feminist and lesbian Cheryl Clarke about her participation in the March on Washington. A poet, essayist and literary critic, Cheryl has been an activist, a teacher and an artist for her entire ...

Feature

Feminism and the Intersectional Politics of Anger

Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

December 28, 2018 • by Holloway Sparks

I began reading Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger the week of Brett Kavanaugh’s second appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Like so many other feminists, I found Kavanaugh’s bellicose and evasive performance utterly infuriating, and I was incensed by Republicans’ sputtering indignation that he had to address the accusations ...

Feminism and the Intersectional Politics of Anger

Feature

“Well Known as Miss Betty Cooper”

Gender Expression in 18th-Century Boston

December 20, 2018 • by Caitlin G.D. Hopkins

In the years before the American Revolution, Boston newspapers routinely advertised the sale and recapture of enslaved people alongside news of Massachusetts’ resistance to British rule. In these ads, enslavers provided descriptions of fugitives in order to assist slave catchers in returning them to bondage. One 1771 advertisement sought the recapture ...

Feature

1968 in the Time of the Plague

The morphing meaning of a remarkable year

December 19, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

As a scholar of the 1960s, I had looked forward for several years to 2018 with both excitement and misgivings. 2018 would be, at last, the Big One: the 50th anniversary of 1968, widely anointed the most remarkable year in a remarkable era. The limelight beckoned for the spirited sub-field of ...

Feature

Confronting the U.S. Census as a Weapon of White Supremacy

The race question has been crucial to civil rights, but it also perpetuates racism

December 17, 2018 • by Karen Gaffney

On March 26, 2018, the Trump administration announced that it would add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Since then, many serious objections have been raised, highlighted through multiple lawsuits. Some are concerned that such a question will cause an undercount, others that it will result in further marginalization of immigrants, less ...

Confronting the U.S. Census as a Weapon of White Supremacy

Education

UNC-Chapel Hill Proposes to Raise Millions to Preserve Silent Sam

This doesn’t solve the problem: and the money could go to pay grad students a living wage

December 14, 2018 • by Meli Kimathi

On the night of December 8, after proctoring the final exam for the undergraduate course I teach, I got the phone call that I simultaneously needed and dreaded. “What are your thoughts on participation?” my co-instructor asked. “I have so many overlapping concerns that I don’t know where to begin!” I exclaimed. ...