Rethinking Race
At the beginning of the twentieth century, to be a progressive, right-thinking American intellectual was to believe in the genetic superiority of certain racial groups. Otherwise known as eugenics or…
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Posts by tag
Anti-Racism
14 posts
Secrets of the Skin, or, Why Foucault Might Have a Problem with White Fragility
One confesses—or is forced to confess.—Michel Foucault The heartbeat of antiracism is confession.—Ibram X. Kendi I have a racist worldview, deep racial bias, racism patterns, and investments in the racist…
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James Baldwin’s Ambiguous Legacy
Whether it is conservatives using Martin Luther King Jr.’s colorblind principles to argue against progressive anti-racism, while ignoring his condemnations of white moderates, or leftists using the legacy of Frederick…
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Modern Anti-Racism Is a Historical Overcorrection
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.—James Baldwin, Notes Of A Native Son (1955) Our collective past, Baldwin argues, is carried over into the present through…
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Beware A World of Marble Trumps: On Campaigns to Remove Statues
Iconoclasm is back. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, progressive activists have pivoted from a narrative that most could unite around—police brutality is wrong and, in the…
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Three Common Fallacies in Arguments About Systemic Racism
Many people, including myself, are highly skeptical of the modern systemic racism narrative: the idea that black people, and other minority groups are systemically oppressed in the United States, via…
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Intersectionality: An Excerpt from “Cynical Theories”
I never again want anyone to say theorizing doesn’t lead to change. Black feminist theory and intersectionality informed the creation of black lives matter. We’d never be this close to…
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Why I’m Leaving My Race. And Why You Should Leave Yours.
One of the more controversial pieces I’ve written critiques Ancestry DNA mania for legitimizing and exacerbating tribal thinking at a point in history when people already see reason enough to…
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Diversity Drop-Out
Austin, Texas prides itself on being a very progressive, liberal city. One of the mayor’s crowning achievements has been putting together a taskforce on Institutional Racism and Systemic Inequities. As…
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What DARE and Diversity Training Programs Have in Common
If you were a high school student in the mid-1990s, as I was, your school may have been visited by representatives of DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the educational program…
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Listening at the Great Awokening
Colleges and universities across the English-speaking world are caught up in the enthusiasm of a Great Awokening. Its dogmas are structural violence, systemic racism, racial stress, white privilege, white fragility,…
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The Evolution Of Heterodox Black Thought
The Racial Impasse Over the past few years, the conversation around race in America has hit a brick wall. While racial disparities have persisted between black Americans and other groups,…
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The Canonization of a School Shooter
Image by Eugene Police Department On 11 January 2019, two police officers responded to a custody dispute at Cascade Middle School in Eugene, Oregon. Charlie Landeros, a thirty-year-old Army veteran,…
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The Influence of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism on Evergreen College
Core Tenets of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism. Racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms Racism is an institutionalized, multilayered, multilevel system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people…
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