When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At ...
Tag: Black Lives Matter
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative ...
Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Get Out”
In the weeks immediately following its release, Jordan Peele’s Get Out quickly established itself as the crossover film ...
Procedural Racism
Every detective story relays at least two narratives: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. In a police procedural, the story of the investigation has police officers discover ...
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
The Book That Made Me: Learn How to Love
The Book That Made Me is a series about the books that have changed our lives. In this inaugural installment, a National Book Award–winning historian …
Black Lives Under Surveillance
Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities ...
On Black Girlhood
The bikini-clad teen is thrown to the ground. An officer, his knee in her back, grabs her braids and slams her head into the grass. She cries, “Call my mama.” When other teens, leaving a pool party ...
Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of “The 13th”
When prisoners in Alabama last spring proposed a national strike to protest “prison slavery,” they called out ...
Art, Protest, Riot
If we could break America’s spellbound gaze on the presidential election, the pressing question of national politics would be this: will the recent fires ignited by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives ...
The Limits of What Is Thinkable
One viewer at the Democratic Primary debate in Des Moines last October asked the candidates a question: “Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?” The same question has been on the lips of many ...
Beyond Neoliberalism
Most of the people I know are constantly seeking self-improvement. Not spiritual enlightenment or knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but the kind of self-improvement that promises career advancement ...