The Virality of Patriotic Antiracism

Combat Veterans and Geopolitical Racism

Today, however, the struggle to destabilize the institutional fabric of disenfranchisement, imprisonment, and wealth inequality risks being buried by viral images of combat veterans “taking a knee,” or the children of service members killed in combat signaling their support for the “cause.” Generally speaking, it has become patriotic to stand ...
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Why Trump’s Words Were Offensive

Myeshia Johnson confirms Trump’s comments as hurtful and disrespectful

Central to all of this was Kelly’s assertion that Trump’s words about Sgt. La David Johnson, the fallen soldier -- “he knew what he was getting into when he signed up” -- were appropriate words, which Kelly himself had been told by General Mo Dunsford when his own son was ...
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Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s Fate

A response to Keval Bhatt

In a stirring, passionate, and bracingly clear recent contribution to the ongoing Charlottesville thread in our “Power and Crisis” vertical, University of Virginia student Keval Bhatt accounts for his decision to join others in shrouding the famous, indeed iconic, statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the University. I ...
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Before Charlottesville

An interview with Carolyn McAllaster on the Greensboro Massacre of 1979

Carolyn McAllaster, the Colin W. Brown Clinical Professor of Law and director of the HIV/AIDS Policy Clinic, said the events in Charlottesville and the president’s response to them sparked memories of the Greensboro Massacre in which five protestors died and 11 were injured even before news of the apology broke. ...
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John Kelly Is a Present Danger to the Republic

With all due respect

Kelly spoke at length about the sacrifices of fallen soldiers, the duties of their military superiors, his own experiences as a commander and also as the father of a fallen soldier, and the advice he supposedly gave to Trump about how best to convey condolences to the families of fallen ...
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Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...
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Why Do You Call Us Ladies?

History, gender, and manners in public life

Consider the story of Abigail Adams and her most famous quote. When Abigail Adams asked her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” as he drafted the Declaration of Independence, she was not advocating for the rights of American women who were predominantly poor, indentured, and enslaved. Rather, she called specifically ...
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The Infant King and Washington’s Tripartite Soul

Freud, Plato, and Trump

In 1933 Charles Laughton won an Oscar for Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. It is a bravura performance, worth revisiting. Laughton’s Henry runs around like a child who just learned how to walk. He gropes, screams, whines, and eats like a baby playing with his food. His temper ...
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Why I Welcome John McCain’s “Liberty Medal” Speech

McCain on the ‘meaning of American politics’

The Center is a bipartisan organization created by Congress to promote an appreciation for the U.S. Constitution. Its President and CEO is Jeffrey Rosen, a highly respected legal journalist. Its Chairman is Joseph Biden (previous chairs include Jeb Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush); its Executive Committee is chaired ...
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Subverting the Symbols of White Supremacy

The wolf and the fox

Fascism had always seemed to me a thing of the past. It was almost like a fairy-tale I was told -- a passive deterrent, an unreal warning -- while going through school. But school was not my education; my real education occurred as I entered the fight against fascism in ...
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Is it Time for the Kneeling Freedman Statue to Go?

Remolding our Political Aesthetics

The contrast between the two is striking and one reason why I take students there. The Emancipation Memorial, designed by Thomas Ball, portrays a stern Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling, newly freed black man. In one of Lincoln’s hands is the Emancipation Proclamation; the other floats above the prone ...
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Is it Time for the Kneeling Freedman Statue to Go?