I finished Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation yesterday (coincidentally on Martin Luther King Day). Just Us is once again a fascinating mix of poetry, art, criticism and (personal) essay on the current state of race and racism in the United States. The title is (probably) adapted from a Richard Pryor quote Rankine also …
Tag Archives: racism
Citizen: An American Lyric
“because white men can’t police their imaginationblack men are dying” I reread Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric recently. Published in 2014, this poetic, artistic snapshot of Black life in the US is stunning in its impact and intellectual heft. The book is decidedly not written for white men like me, and can, maybe should make …
1000 Serpentinen Angst
I highly recommend the debut novel by Olivia Wenzel.
The Oscars Love Racial Reconciliation Movies.
Wesley Morris sums up the problem with Oscar-winning movies like The Green Book for the New York Times: The money is ostensibly for legitimate assistance, but it also seems to paper over all that’s potentially fraught about race. The relationship is entirely conscripted as service and bound by capitalism and the fantastically presumptive leap is, …
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“If I shut my eyes, I can still feel the fire from those days. And if I open my eyes, I still see the fires all around me. I didn’t like the way the world was, and I believe that there need to be some changes about the way the world is.”John Carlos won bronze …
Now, I can’t help but feel that the 52 percent of my fellow Ohioans who voted for Trump want my family and me out. I look at my neighborhood and this is all I can think. Because it’s predominantly white and upper-middle class, it likely leaned even more toward Trump. This is what that “silent majority,” …
100 Days of Bad Ideas
The smart people at NPR Politics went through Trump’s “Contract with the America Voter,” i.e. his first 100 days plan, to see how feasible is. For example, here is their analysis of Trump’s plan to gut the Affordable Care Act:The GOP Congress has already demonstrated its willingness to repeal the insurance tax subsidies and Medicaid …
Donald Trump, Nativism, and Patterns in US History
In her opening segment last night, after Donald Trump’s horrifying anti-immigrant speech, Rachel Maddow put the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right into political history context. She argues that when one of the two major parties in the US two party system collapses, and can no longer hold its own weight and position in …
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There are some words that precede “Black Lives Matter,” and they go something like this: Because of the brutalizing and killing of black people at the hands of the police and the indifference of society in general and the criminal justice system in particular, it is important that we say that… “ This is, of …
“These Young People Are Dying to Belong.”
Walking back from the grocery store, I listened to the newest episode of the great NPR podcast Invisibilia. When I returned to my desk and skimmed through the news, I saw just how apropos the episode is. A young Afghan man, a kid really at 17 years, apparently attacked people on a train near Würzburg in …
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CLARITY AND CHAOS 