On Race — isms

We’ve been here: Selections from 6+ years of anti-racist internet reading

Recognizing and responding to racism is a journey. If you find yourself in a dramatically different place from where you were in 2014, or 2016, or 2 months ago — ready now to grapple with more ideas and…

“ICE Came for a Tennessee Town’s Immigrants. The Town Fought Back.”

“the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Southeastern Provision plant outside the city and sent dozens of workers to out-of-state detention centers was the day people in Morristown began to…

“White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness”

“So long as we aren’t hanging out with white nationalists, marrying into a family of color or chuckling over jokes about our dancing, we have endless opportunities to avoid thinking much about our own race. We generally…

“How Faculty of Color Hurt Their Careers Helping Universities with Diversity”

“The failure of many top schools to make significant progress on diversity can mean that institutions are relying too heavily on a tiny fraction of the higher education community to smooth over…

“The Names of the Enslaved People who Built the University of North Carolina”

“The joint efforts of researchers, archivists, historians, students, and administrators has resulted in the identification of more than 100 enslaved people who built and labored at the University…

“What The Kanye Controversy Can Teach Us About Black Voters”

“What White and and three other researchers found in a recent study is that social pressure from other black people is how this Democratic norm gets policed. They found that the expectations around this norm were so powerful…

“When Southern Newspapers Justified Lynching”

“Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white…

“How to not photograph Nigerian women… again”

“Despite the stated goals of this project — to recapture on film the dignity of these young women — in the end what we get are 83 portraits that evoke only a single frozen moment in each women’s life, one that has everything to do with suffering and…

“What It Means When Childish Gambino Says ‘This Is America’”

“Created by guns, overflowing with guns, America had always been a sort of rhetorical weapon, its greatness a cudgel applied to recalcitrant people of color at home or abroad. What the Trump campaign and election signaled was…