The Riot on New Zealand’s Front Lawn

Reckoning with an antivax occupation, homegrown racism, and global white nationalism

Ardern’s words might have comforted those New Zealanders taken aback by the protest, but it fails to seriously engage with the complexity of the occupation, which intermingled transnational far-right tactics with homegrown white supremacy, wellness misinformation, and indigenous disenfranchisement. The protest, and Ardern’s response, has wide implications for parsing both ...
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The Riot on New Zealand’s Front Lawn

Everything Associated with January 6 Is a Performance

Televised government hearings are political theater: make Americans watch by assembling a star-studded cast

January 6 was broadcast on live TV, bringing the performativity of Trump partisans to many Americans who had never experienced their theatrical quality. The costumes, the flags, the signage, and the face-paint compelled and stunned many viewers....

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Everything Associated with January 6 Is a Performance

Statement about Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict

A letter from the president of The New School

Dear New School students and colleagues, I want to take a moment to respond to the verdict that was delivered last Friday afternoon in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, wherein Mr. Rittenhouse was found to be not guilty on all counts. I have heard from many individuals in The New School community ...
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Statement about Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict

Speaking of Race

In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Celeste Headlee shows how two determined friends opened a white supremacist’s mind

First is the story of Derek Black, godson of David Duke (former grand wizard of the KKK) and son of Don Black, who founded the neo-Nazi online forum Stormfront in 1996. Derek was raised in a tradition of hate and became a true believer in the white nationalist cause. Then ...
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Speaking of Race

Are White People Really in Decline?

No, but when the mainstream media reports changing racial demographics as a contest for social domination, they validate white supremacists’ worst fears

_____ When the United States Census Bureau released its 2020 census on August 12, 2021, the news media highlighted two important trends in race and ethnicity: a drop in the number of white people and a rise in the number of people who identify with more than one racial group. Both facts represent ...
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Are White People Really in Decline?

Vietnamese in America

A cross generational conversation about culture and identity

_____ I hadn’t fully grasped it until most recently, but my identity has always been amorphous. When I came of age in Southern California, I didn’t feel so different than my fellow Gen X peers. I was lost, perpetually grumpy, restless — which wasn’t different from what I was seeing in ...
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Vietnamese in America

A Genealogy of White Privilege

An essay on the politics of confession & guilt

_____ How much shame and guilt should a movement for social justice try deliberately to cultivate?  In recent years, this question, superficially abstract, has again become personal for me, both in my ongoing involvement in political protest movements, and my job as a teacher, working at an institution devoted to promoting equity, ...
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A Genealogy of White Privilege

The United States Is in Recovery

What Texas, white supremacy and coronavirus can teach us about American history

"In the exchange, Americans saw a president who cared, and a government that finally, after its previous leaders had told them to get out of a terrible catastrophe on their own, responded to their needs."...

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The United States Is in Recovery

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Lessons from the 1871 congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings

“The truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.”  W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935 In 1871, in the midst of escalating racial violence that killed up to 30,000 in the post-Civil War South, Congress launched one ...
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Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

The Thin Blue Line

The Trump campaign weaves evangelicals and the alt-right more tightly into the president’s increasingly fragile base

------ Recognizing that he is losing the demographics he needs to win reelection, Trump has clearly decided that his best bet is to spur his base to turn out in vast numbers and vote. To that end, he has given up any pretense of appealing to voters outside his base. At ...
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The Proud Boys

Past Present Podcast, Episode 249

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: At last week’s presidential debate, President Trump drew attention to the all-male street gang, the Proud Boys, when he told them to “stand back and stand by.” Niki commented on the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes. Natalia discussed how the example ...
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Anti Bodies

Two American Pandemics

------- We now live in a time when the line between being a nobody and a somebody can be drawn by an antibody. Humanity is split. And so is the screen of our double American crisis—one channel nervously tracking a global pandemic, the other crackling with eruptions of civil unrest. But ...
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Anti Bodies