“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Revelations 6:8

In a previous post, I traced Christendom’s roots in antisemitism and Islamophobia. …

“To betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe.”- James Baldwin

Not long ago, it was possible to believe that our age was rational because it was tolerant and tolerant because it was rational. Today, every news cycle assaults us with how comical that was. The old hatreds, updated for a new millennium, have recovered their vigor and are out for conquest. What happened? …

Last summer Shaun King published an article on Jacobin magazine’s website entitled “Why Bernie Sanders’s history of racial justice activism matters.” Of course his racial justice activism “matters.” It mattered to Black students who wanted to inhabit the University of Chicago’s dormitory’s on a non-segregated basis. It mattered to Black Chicago Public Schools students who felt their city, state and country owed them more for classrooms than sweltering rat traps in the summer that doubled as freezing rat traps in the winter. It also matters that Sanders was not among the Whites who viciously assaulted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…

In the wake of Jon Ossof’s loss to Karen Handel in Georgia’s sixth district, certain segments of the left have resurrected an old debate about the relationship between “Identity politics” and “class politics.” I find this debate tedious, but it keeps happening so I’ll engage it. First, a definition of terms: When I say “class politics” I mean the politics of those whose primary concern is the distribution of wealth and control of the means of production in society. By “identity politics”, I mean the politics of those whose primary concern is the treatment of minority groups in society. Of…

Donald Trump has been blowing things up. But no, this is not quite right, as Donald Trump is just some fat septuagenarian. He, as himself, has as much power to rain fire from the sky as I do. This time last year, he couldn’t have blown up his own toilet without getting the approval of a municipal bureaucrat. Now he can, and on his own authority, cause great machines of destruction to be hurled across the seas and crash into other people. This is nothing short of miraculous, we have wrapped him in political majesty, and now, in many of…

White genocide is a curious horror. If it were happening or possible within our lifetimes, it would be as atrocious as any mass murder. But with the world as it is, it comes to us only as a fanciful nightmare nourished by overwrought White supremacist imaginations. I recall a comedy routine by Louis C.K. concerning the benefits of Whiteness:

“I don’t want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people because we’re gonna pay hard for this shit, you got to know that. We’re not going to just fall from number one to two. They’re…

When I first read the name: Alton Sterling, I was scrolling down my Facebook feed at 11 pm after having worked an 8 hr shift. My first unbidden thought was: “Lord, why?” If this makes me sound religious, it shouldn’t, it is simply the result of cultural conditioning, itself conditioned by 400 years of being at the mercy of an unspeakably brutal power. Religious or not, one feels the urge to yell up into the sky, whether one expects an answer or not. I didn’t watch the video then, at the ripe old age of 25 I’ve finally learned to…

Dear Ms. Sherman,

When I read your reflection in The American Conservative I was so sorry to hear that you had mistaken the museum at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for a monument to the Declaration of Independence. This mistake clearly caused much despair to you, and I suspect, to your unwitting children, who later found themselves flung headfirst into the depths of their mother’s folly before a crowd of annoyed weekenders. And so, though it was due to your own mistake, I offer you my sympathy and am glad to hear, for the sake of your emotional well-being, that out of…