“Why Liberals Separate Race from Class”

“the now-commonplace claim at the heart of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against Sanders is that white liberals have long reduced racism to class inequality in order to deflect attention from racial disparities.

“AN INTERACTIVE GUIDE TO AMBIGUOUS GRAMMAR.”

“As a thought experiment, let’s examine in extremely close detail a set of iterative changes that can be made to a single simple grammatical structure, turning it from a statement taken at face value into one loaded with unrealized implication. This…

“The Psychological Warfare Being Waged Against Black Lives Matter”

“my old friend’s question says much to me about the quotidian ways that otherwise well-meaning white people misunderstand racial discourse in this country. Like many Americans, I watched horrified last week as news…

Collected writing on campus activism, free speech, and safety

I am posting about this just once, in a compilation, because I realized the other day that this has become yet another unproductively polarized political identity: are you in favor of free speech or prejudice-free spaces?

“How does black hair reflect black history?”

“In the 1930s, Rastafari theology developed in Jamaica from the ideas of Marcus Garvey, a political activist who wanted to improve the status of his fellow blacks.

Believers are forbidden to cut their hair and instead twist it…

“Turns out people get angry when you say white Americans are terrorists, too”

“Some of them objected to our decision to call the terrorists “white Americans” instead of “some white Americans” or “white American extremists.” Without qualifying the term, they argued, we were…

“The Black-White Sleep Gap”

“Gen­er­ally, people are thought to spend 20 per­cent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white par­ti­cipants hit this mark. Black par­ti­cipants, however, spent only about 15 per­cent of the night in slow-wave sleep.

The study was just…

“Why Protesting Georgetown Students Want Their School to Pay a Novel Form of Reparations”

“Activists began staging a sit-in outside the Georgetown president’s office today, calling for a conversation about race on campus and a reckoning with how the school has…

“Cultivation Theory: Why Viola Davis’ Emmy Win Matters”

“In layman’s terms, it’s a theory that suggests that over time, people begin to believe that the television universe reflects real life. Essentially, people who watch lots of TV begin to see the social reality of fiction as an…