Departments

;

racism

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    1/25/2021

    What Hank Aaron Told Me

    The author received a touching reply to a fan letter he wrote Hank Aaron in 1972. Writing a book about Aaron years later, he realized he didn't know the half of the burdens Aaron carried in pursuit of baseball immortality. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    1/22/2021

    White Americans have Weaponized the Idea of Girlhood

    by Crystal Webster

    The concept of childhood has elastic boundaries; in a racist society, those boundaries stretch to portray whites as innocents deserving protection and Black youth as dangerous and susceptible to punishment. 

  • 1/24/2021

    Misremember the Alamo

    by Douglas Sackman

    Like most Americans, when Trump tries to "remember the Alamo," he gets it all wrong. His recent visit to Alamo, Texas was 240 miles south of the mission so holy to many Texans, but it was closer in spirit than Trump probably realized. 

  • SOURCE: ESPN
    1/22/2021

    Hank Aaron's Lasting Impact is Measured in More than Home Runs

    by Howard Bryant

    Hank Aaron biographer Howard Bryant shared common experiences with the baseball legend as a Black man in the sports industry. He writes about the legacy of the slugger who lived through the Jim Crow and civil rights eras and died at age 86 today. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    1/18/2021

    When Black Humanity is Denied

    by Edna Bonhomme

    Enlightenment institutions – the prison, science, and asylums – are organized through binaries that draw boundaries between people who are and are not able to exercise freedom. Black artistic work supports Black freedom by challenging those boundaries. 

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    1/18/2021

    The Next New Deal Must Be for Black Americans, Too

    by Willow Lung-Amam

    Those advocating for New Deal-type programs from the Biden-Harris administration must be profoundly aware of the way the first New Deal accommodated racial prejudice and deepened material inequality; any acceptable understanding of "build back better" must actively tackle racial inequality as well as protecting the existing middle class.

  • 1/17/2020

    Confronting "Who We Are"

    by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

    The Capitol riots should prompt consideration of how racism is sustained by mainstream institutions and operates through everyday patterns of thought and action, as much as in open eruptions of violence. 

  • 1/17/2020

    Restoring Civil Society by Executive Order?: An Inaugural Reverie

    by John L. Godwin

    Joe Biden should defend the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly by a temporary emergency order criminalizing the carrying of firearms at public protest events and make clear that the threat of force is not part of the democratic process.

  • 1/14/2020

    Historians, Insurrectionists and Fragile White Folks

    by James Brewer Stewart

    A historian of abolition and an advocate of racial justice argues that historians must reject the psychological framework of some recent popular antiracist books and learn from the history of activists embodying Frederick Douglass's call for a "moral revolution" through engagement with others.

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    1/14/2021

    How Fear Took Over the American Suburbs

    Historian Kyle Riismandel's new book “Neighborhood of Fear” examines the cultivation of a white suburban culture of vigilantism and the political exploitation of fear of community change in the late 20th century. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    1/11/2021

    Denial Is the Heartbeat of America

    by Ibram X. Kendi

    Claims that the Capitol riots were "not who we are" are rooted in denial of the long history of racist and antidemocratic politics in the United States.