“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 …
Tag Archives: white supremacy
The case against Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” is a triumph of style over substance, of clamorous white grievance over knowable facts. This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never …
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ White Privilege
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis released a new song on Friday called “White Privilege II” along with a new album. It’s less pop radio friendly that his hits, and is a 9 minute reflection by Macklemore on white privilege, white supremacy, the way he benefits from it and how he is somewhat complicit in it. I …
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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Letter To My Son”
Coates, possibly the most important writer at this moment in America, wrote a long letter to his son about growing up and being Black:“I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable …
“Ebola” Illustration by André Carrilho.
Clive Bundy, White Supremacy, and the Historical Reality of Slavery
It shouldn’t really be a surprise that Cliven Bundy, leader of the absurd Nevada cattle tax stand off against “the Feds,”* also is problematic on other fronts. As Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes from a NY Times piece, Bundy had this to say about poor Black people: “And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now …
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This multilingual rendition of America the Beautiful by/for Coke was one of the ads during last night’s Super Bowl that didn’t suck. It’s quite a beautiful, charming rendition of the song, young voices, celebrating the sublime landscape of the United States, a patriotic song, promoting the essential American drink. In its core, this ad is …
CLARITY AND CHAOS 