By Marc Cooper (June 28, 2017) Trump is truly confounding. Unless you understand the core truth about him. His permanent insecurity leads him to seek immediate and instant adulation and that is about it. He has no other “strategy” — in any realm of his life. Every other president in history, for myriad reasons including the most banal, has tried…
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By Mark Naison (June 27, 2017) Ever since the Clinton Presidency, the Democratic Party has been an advocate of top-down school reforms whose goal has been to make the nation more economically competitive and reduce inequality. Not only have these policies failed to achieve their stated objectives, they have destabilized communities where Democrats have traditionally found support, created widespread distress…
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By Phoenix Calida (June 20, 2017) Just another day in America as a bl*ck person… Since the Philando Castile verdict came down, all I see is Bl*ck friends asking about life insurance policies begging friends to only share the most respectable profile pics, just in case asking friends to make sure their name is spelled properly in the hashtag asking…
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By S. (June 18, 2017) As is natural on Fathers Day, our minds turn to the original Star Wars trilogy. Instead of focusing on Vader as is custom on this day, I urge you all to consider Uncle Owen Lars. Luke spends the entire trilogy mourning the death of Obi Wan and obsessing over Vader. But Owen was there since…
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By Teka Lark (June 17, 2017) I foolishly thought, because he was nice, they had a video, white people liked him, he had a job, he had been stopped 52 times for no reason, he didn’t have a record, they had a video, they had a video, they had a video, white people liked him, white people liked him— I…
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By S. (June 14, 2017) Thought experiment for my white friends: In The Handmaid’s Tale a cabal of elite, white Christians seize control of the government, send all of the black people away (to reservations or death camps, it’s not clear), and then turn every white woman into a slave. What feelings arise when you imagine the same scenario, except…
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By Chris Lowe (June 13, 2017) (Photo: Flyer found in Eugene, Oregon near the University of Oregon campus) 1) Athena hates this. In the days of the greatness of her city, it was Mediterranean, brown was beautiful, and Europe was the domain of pasty faced barbarians reddened by shame, shyness or anger. In the words of the famous graffito “Wogs…
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By Joseph Orosco (June 12, 2017) Two legal news items today that may seem disconnected, but are not. In fact, they are reflections of the deep legacy of white supremacy in the United States. Today is the 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which struck down the 1924 Racial Integrity Act that prohibited whites…
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By Alexander Reid Ross (June 10, 2017) I’ve seen a lot of snark from the Patriot movement saying that antifascists are demonstrating today in defense of Sharia law. The problem is that the Patriot movement has no idea what either Islam or Sharia law actually are, let alone why antifascists have taken to the streets today. Joey Gibson came close…
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By Paul Messersmith-Glavin (June 1, 2017) We’d be fooling ourselves to think that the Paris Climate Accords are going to avert the looming disaster that is rapidly unfolding climate disruption. They are not binding agreements, they don’t confront the root causes, and they don’t go far enough. At the same time, the Trump administration pulling out of these modest agreements…
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By Chris Crass (June 1, 2017) I am with you. Because I feel the grief and anguish of these times, with the recent murders of Black, Indigenous, and white people in Maryland, Washington and Oregon by white supremacists. Of Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, canceling two public speaking engagements on the West Coast, after receiving…
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