When the George Floyd was killed, Americans took the streets in protest. When Donald Trump was elected president, the #MeToo movement took the streets in protest. Why don’t we see similar uprisings in support of working class Americans fighting for […]
race in America
Wheaton College study on race: “We cannot be healed and cannot be reconciled unless and until we repent”
A Wheaton College task force has released a 122-page historical report on race relations at the evangelical institution. Read it here. Here is Daniel Silliman and Kate Shellnut at Christianity Today: Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, […]
Bayard Rustin and the politics of class
Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was a complicated guy. Perhaps that’s why I find myself drawn to him and his work. Today The New York Times is running a piece on Rustin by writer James Kirchick. Kirchick is the author […]
Eboo Patel: “It’s time to overturn the Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi model” of “power and privilege”
Patel argues that universities should switch from an “antiracism” model of diversity to a ‘cosmpolitan” model. Here is a taste his Chronicle of Higher Education piece: “Today’s DEI Is Obsessed With Power and Privilege“: Over the past five years or […]
For some at a 1933 civil rights conference, fighting racial oppression meant fighting class oppression
Over at Jacobin, historian Eben Miller tells the story of the 1933 Amenia conference. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hosted the event in Amenia, New York. W.E.B. Du Bois was co-organizer. Some of the country’s […]
John McWhorter on the Florida African American history curriculum
I took a little heat for my take on the Florida African American history controversy. Last month I wrote: The standards were much better than I expected. If I was a high school teacher in Florida I could easily work […]
Does a fixation with identity politics hurt the fight against racism?
Over at Jacobin, Taj Ali interviews writer Kenan Malik, the author of Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. Here is a taste: TAJ ALI: You discuss the decline of cross-racial class […]
Some historical context on the Jason Aldean controversy
Here is historian Nicole Hemmer at CNN: It was mid-November 1927 when, at a Tennessee courthouse wrapped in patriotic decor to celebrate Armistice Day, a White mob seized a Black teenager named Henry Choate and hanged him from the building’s balcony. The […]
Joyce Carol Oates on writing, memory, Twitter, and identity politics
At age 85, writer Joyce Carol Oates has “so many ideas.” Check out David Marchese’s interview with Oates at The New York Times. Here is a taste: How does support for the idea that diverse voices should be given primacy […]
John McWhorter on affirmative action
Reading McWhorter’s piece today at The New York Times reminds me of the first time I read Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory twenty years ago. The only difference is that McWhorter took the Ivy League job and Rodriguez turned it […]
The Author’s Corner with Hajar Yazdiha
Hajar Yazdiha is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. This interview is based on her new book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press, […]
Elite college prof: “affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture”
Here is a taste of Tyler Austin Harper’s New York Times piece: “I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admission.” Harper is a professor of environmental studies at Bates College. When I was […]
David Brooks makes an argument for class-based college admissions
Here is The New York Times columnist in the wake of the Supreme Court ending affirmative action today: We’ve been debating affirmative action since I was in diapers, and increasingly the Supreme Court has gotten into this issue, and now […]
Tim Scott hopes that he can win the GOP nomination by playing his own version of the race card
South Carolina Senator Tim Scott spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference. Watch: It looks like Scott is going to run as Black conservative at a time when most conservatives believe that Democrats are dividing the […]
“The worst of the DEI industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive.”
Here is Conor Freidersdorf at The Atlantic: The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public […]
The Author’s Corner with Kevin McQueeney
Kevin McQueeney is Assistant Professor of History at Nicholls State University. This interview is based on his new book, A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans (University of North Carolina […]
The D.E.I. debate
Florida governor Ron DeSantis just signed a bill banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities. Here are two pieces I read today about the state of DEI on campuses and in the corporate world. Here is a taste […]
What is going on at Taylor University?
Here is Bob Smietana at Religion News Service: A veteran English professor at a leading evangelical university has lost her job — in part because a school official deemed her writing classes too liberal on the issue of race. Julie […]
The Author’s Corner with Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Nicholas Dagen Bloom is Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. This interview is based on his new book, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (University of Chicago Press, 2023). […]
Historian Barbara Fields on the 1619 Project
Here is the Columbia University historian on how to think historically about 17th-century Virginia: