When it comes to thinking about race and human rights, I’m obsessed. You’ve probably noticed that. But what might be less obvious (or, who knows, maybe more obvious) is that the pandemic has put my obsession on blast. Case in point, I was up at 5:30 today, eventually landed at my desk, and there I […]
Topic | white supremacy
Antisemitism Is Racism
I believe that the reason that so many progressives, including racial justice progressives, don’t understand the threat of antisemitism and even, really, that antisemitism is in fact racism!!! is that we understand racism wrong, or at least incompletely. Here’s what I mean. U.S. residents, for the most part, think of racism in terms of effects […]
A White Gay Male Faction of White Nationalism is Rising and No, That’s Not a Joke
Donna Minkowitz writes in Slate about the emergence of a white gay male alt-right/white nationalist/neo-Nazi front using camp and sex to attract recruits. As counter-intuitive as the idea of a gay white nationalist movement may be, this development is very dangerous, making the article, IMO, a must-read for all who are fearful of white nationalism. […]
Anti-Black Racism is Still the Fulcrum of White Supremacy
In a highly globalized society, with mass migration driving rapid change in the racial demography, both of the world and of the U.S., racial attacks and racism itself have grown much more complex, making last century understandings of the racial context less useful or even misleading. Whiteness, however, is still at the center of American […]
About the Stereotype Busting High Median Incomes of Trump Voters
Nate Silver’s findings regarding the median incomes of Trump supporters are worth taking a look at as what he has found busts the frankly offensive stereotype of the Trump supporter as a working class rube. When trying to defeat a bigot, one would do best not to fall prey to bigotry. Doing so just polarizes an already […]
Trump, Racism, and the Fear Factor
A recent USA TODAY/Rock the Vote poll of 1,541 voters aged 18-34 found that younger voters’ lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is overcome in a theoretical Clinton v. Trump general election race. Across all demographic groups specified, young voters only get excited about Clinton as the lesser evil. The lack of enthusiasm for Clinton in the […]
On Solidarity, “Centering Anti-Blackness,” and Asian Americans
As a long-time racial justice worker – a grey head in a movement mainly made up of young people – earnest young Asian Americans, anxious to acknowledge the pivotal role anti-Black racism plays in the perpetuation of white supremacy, often ask me how to “center anti-Blackness” in Asian American racial justice activism. I am as often asked that […]
No, Dylann Roof, Asians Aren’t “So” Racist
The racist manifesto attributed to vigilante racist, Dylann Roof, is troubling for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that Roof’s diatribe reflects certain broadly held and increasingly mainstream beliefs among whites, like, for instance, that Blacks are the true racists and whites are under attack. And this plum, “black on White crime” is the […]
The Twisted History of Jerry Hough
It’s been a while since Duke University Political Science Professor, Jerry Hough, kicked off a sh*t storm of commentary by offering a bluntly racist critique of the New York Times article, How Racism Doomed Baltimore. The Times piece is an excellent take down of entrenched poverty among Blacks in Baltimore, describing the collapse of Baltimore’s inner-city as […]
Why We Can’t Trust the US State
A version of this talk was delivered originally at a teach-in on “Ferguson and Beyond: Race, State Violence, and Activist Agendas in the 21st Century” at the University of Washington on January 23, 2015. Video of the teach in can be viewed here. Let me begin by pointing out some obvious, but oftentimes overlooked, points. […]
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