By Alexander Reid Ross (May 21, 2018) It’s just a nightmare. I’m from Houston. It’s a place near and dear to my heart. When this sort of thing becomes normal, we all become targets. That this latest shooting was carried out by a gun obsessed white male is as unsurprising as his apparent fusion of authoritarian left-right politics. A hammer…
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By Mark Naison (April 30, 2018) My Black friends have always told me “Mark, if you were Black, saying the things you do, acting the way you do, you would have been dead a long time ago.” If you think they were exaggerating, read the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the death threats and insults the African…
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By Arun Gupta (April 24, 2018) “Pittsburgh is the New Portland” has become a cliche. The meaning is it’s a medium-sized environmentally friendly city hospitable to young people who are creative, have an unorthodox lifestyle, or politics, and the city is low cost and close to nature, at least compared to cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco….
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By S. (April 23, 2018) Dear White America, We have a communication problem. You are getting better at listening. In the past you’ve blamed us for not communicating to you in a manner that would facilitate you listening. We were too angry, too quiet, too loud, politically inconvenient, self-centered, stuck in victim mindset. Finally, thanks to cell phone footage, you…
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By Teka Lark (April 17, 2018) Boycott all Starbucks. Not just the one. The good white people need to learn too. Why I do the work that I do. I will not share the video of two Black men being removed by the Philadelphia police from Starbucks, because a white person was “afraid” (they aren’t afraid, they are racist) and…
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By Irami Osei-Frimpong (April 2, 2018) The number of times I hear some version of, “You can’t expect white people to ever be fair” is astounding. I hear this from white and black people across the education divide. Honestly, the people who are the most smug about this as a truism are white women with lots and lots of degrees….
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By Alexander Reid Ross (March 21, 2018) While I’m happy that Richard Spencer is miserable and Heimbach may be going to jail, I think it’s too early to say “we won.” We succeeded—for now—in pushing the Alt Right and its bedfellows off the streets. That may mean our methods have been successful, among other things, but it doesn’t mean that…
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By Teka Lark (March 13, 2018) “We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder–on your head–to prove to himself and his…
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By Tommy J. Curry (February 20, 2018) It is so funny to me how all these commentaries on Black Panther are coming out without really any understanding of the MCU. Black people love pretending they are overnight specialists in anything Black. You do understand that if you accept the existence of Wakanda, you also accept the existence of mutants like…
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By S. (February 15, 2018) I’m looking forward to the new Black Panther movie too, but first, let’s have a little talk about race. Since being kidnapped from Africa, black people have been marginalized. Marginalized means we have been placed at the margins, we are never centered. Our rights, our voices, our experiences, our lives, our needs, our everything, are…
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By Alexander Reid Ross (February 15, 2018) Here’s why I call them the “Alt Right” instead of just “Nazis.” The Alt Right is a composite of a number of far-right tendencies including anarcho-capitalists, silicon valley neo-reactionaries, MRAs, Klansmen, and other forms of fascists. Broadly, it’s a fascist movement, but it’s a fascist movement of a certain character. Calling them the…
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