When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists ...
Tag: Racism
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
Public Thinker: Thomas J. Sugrue on History’s Hard Lessons
From producing towering classics in the field of urban history to penning ...
Francisco Cantú Talks Borders, Rhetoric, and Climate Change
Twenty pages into my first reading of The Line Becomes a River, I laid the book ...
B-Sides: Chaucer’s “The House of Fame”
For years, and with particular intensity since the 2015 Dylann Roof shooting and 2016 election, we have debated the fate of not only Confederate monuments but ...
“Caste, Class, and Race” @ 70
As we pass the 70th anniversary of Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, his message ...
Masculinity on the Mat
From Ready Player One to Roseanne, popular culture in 2018 might be looked back on as “problematic,” to use a polite academic term, in its attempts to bottle and sell 1980s nostalgia. Conservative in both form and content ...
@X: Making America White 200 Years Ago
In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans gathered in Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia ...
The World of Asian American Studies
Last summer marked a watershed of sorts. Crazy Rich Asians became one of the most successful romantic comedies ever, grossing over $165 million in the US ...
Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in ...
“Read, Mourn, Learn”: Syllabi for Election Day 2018
Voting today is of the highest importance, but it’s likely that more than half of ...
Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes ...
Rethinking Civil Rights, Reimagining Black Liberation
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter ushered in a new era of social ...
Who Segregated America?
Recently long-listed for the National Book Award for nonfiction, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is an accessible and powerful account of how metropolitan America became racially segregated ...
Toward the Black Girl Future
To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in ...
Free the Most Oppressed First
Do we still need to talk about identity politics? In the wake of the 2016 election and amid the ongoing parody that is the Trump administration, the subject has ...
Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist ...
Adoption Anxieties
Given the overall paucity of novels about interracial adoption, it is striking that no fewer than three were published in 2017. In general, reviewers warmly received Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, Lisa ...
Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential ...
“Rivers of Blood” @50
Imperial historians, and inhabitants of places colonized by Britain, know that much of England’s history happened beyond its borders. As decolonization whittled away imperial possessions ...
