“How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor”

“when we’re truly honest, we see that for many the study of Classics is the study of one elite white man after another. The same texts that are for us sources of beauty and brutality, subjects of commentary and critique, are for these men (and…

“How Race Is Conjured”

“For most people, race is the obvious starting point for discussions of racism. You invert that assumption in Racecraft, arguing that race has no biological basis and therefore can’t be the starting point for any reasonable discussion. You created the word “racecraft” to identify how —…

“Finding Hope in a Loveless Place”

“To be professionally smart is to concede always to rational science, to polls and confidence intervals. These colleagues, the professionally smart, seemed dismayed that the black woman they’d been brave enough to think smart could believe a President Trump was…

“5 Lessons Traveling to Africa Taught Me About Being Black in America”

“Black America, we have so much to actually learn about Africa — and yes, it does matter.

For far too long, our perceptions have been negatively impacted by white dominated narratives…

“NY Times Portrays Islam More Negatively Than Cancer, Major Study Finds”

““When we went into it we didn’t think it would be surprising if Islam was one of the most negatively portrayed topics in the NYT,” says co-author Usaid Siddiqui. “What did really surprise us was that…

“How to Eat a Banana”

“I tried to distance myself from “Chinese culture” by moving towards what I thought was its polar opposite: the West. At the age of five I declared myself English and “Christian”, believing God to be the Western version of Buddha. I became determined to improve my English in primary…

“The Huddled Masses And The Myth Of America”

““Our founding documents were all published in German to accommodate the German-speaking populations. For most of the 19th century, instruction in public schools across the country — from Pennsylvania to Texas to Wisconsin — occurred entirely in…

“WHITE WRITER”

“ It is a cultural moment that has made white writers look in the mirror and wonder if we have been confusing it with a window. White writers are not used to being objectified in this way. One of our conceits has been to imagine ourselves as neutral, objective, and value-free. Yet this sense of…

“Brown as Dirt”

“Zimring shows how the discourse of urban hygiene dovetailed perfectly with old-fashioned American racism. Whiteness and cleanliness — now a major civic virtue — were construed as one and the same…

After reading Zimring’s account, it becomes hard to avoid spotting the…