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

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

In this interview with Public Seminar, the memoirist discusses complex mother/daughter dynamics, enthusiastic consent, and finding clarity through the “privacy of the page.”

New School alum and bestselling author Melissa Febos sat down (virtually) with Public Seminar intern Madeleine Janz to discuss writing about those you love most, complicated “almost” traumas, and the inherited shame of female adolescence. Febos’s newest book, an essay collection entitled Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), was on The New School’s Alumni Bookshelf this year and is available for purchase here.   Madeleine Janz [MJ]: To ...
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Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...
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A Pencil For Your Land

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?

When Saying “I’m Sorry” Is Not Enough

The anatomy of an apology

_____ An apology has an essential value.   it enables the apologizer, the perpetrator of a transgression, to reclaim its moral character in the aftermath of the transgression. By apologizing, the perpetrator is attempting to reclaim its humanity, its place in the community of civilized individuals or institutions. In a real sense, ...
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When Saying “I’m Sorry” Is Not Enough

Gun Violence Is as American as Apple Pie

But gun ownership only became popular after World War II, when conservatives united to prevent desegregation

_____ America today is caught in a plague of gun violence. It wasn’t always this way. Americans used to own guns without engaging in daily massacres. Indeed, it always jumps out at me that the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, when members of one Chicago gang set up and killed ...
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Gun Violence Is as American as Apple Pie

Why the Howling That New York’s Private Schools Have Been Taken Over By Critical Race Theory?

Claims that children are being harmed are a thin cover for returning to a world where white people don’t have to feel bad about racism

Late last week, Paul Rossi, a member of the mathematics faculty at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan, denounced the social justice and anti-racism program instituted by the school in 2020. Before writing this essay, published on Bari Weiss’s contrarian Substack, Common Sense, Rossi was already in hot water. By ...
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Why the Howling That New York’s Private Schools Have Been Taken Over By Critical Race Theory?

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

Collective memories of emancipation through cultural production

————— Amanda Bellows is a Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College where she teaches nineteenth century U.S. History. Her new publication, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination was published by the University of North Carolina Press, June 2020. This book is ...
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American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

How Black Women Fight for Our Democracy

A conversation about Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

A legal and cultural historian, Martha Jones has dedicated herself to telling the story of how Black Americans have shaped American democracy, even – or especially – when they were formally excluded from the democratic process itself.  Jones’s most recent contribution is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and ...
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How Black Women Fight for Our Democracy

Why Race Still Matters

We don’t need to know what race is — we need to know what it does

————— The work, most prominently, of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings. The anthropologist of race Ashley Montagu, ...
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Why Race Still Matters

When It Comes to Racial Justice, Why Is It Wrong to Demand the “Impossible”?

Because when white comfort matters most, Black lives are not a priority

On a recent episode of The Open Mind, Alexander Heffner asked his guest, activist minister and scholar Nyle Fort, about the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and the reemergence of social justice protests across America. Referencing Arundhati Roy’s recent essay “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Fort meditated on the potential ...
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When It Comes to Racial Justice, Why Is It Wrong to Demand the “Impossible”?

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