Liberating the Young Scholar
I always share that I am a student who struggled. My kindergarten teacher told my parents that I would never pass the first grade.
Tag: race
The Problem of White People, with Insight from St. Paul
“I’m proud to be white,” someone recently told me. He interjected the comment in a contentious political conversation. I responded by advocating “more caution” in expression. The exchange fizzled without resolution. Yet this phrase, “proud to be white,” continues to disturb. My conversation partner was no white supremacist. But his chosen phrase would have fooled many. What lies within it is a key for understanding a threatening and intractable problem of American society: what I call “the problem of white people.”
Call for Contributors: Making Brett Kavanaugh – Masculinity in America
The Activist History Review seeks articles on the historical and present-day construction of masculinity in the United States and its significance for politics, society, economics, and culture.
Academic Racism: The Repression of Marginalized Voices in Academia
Several years ago, during a tenure-track search, I asked two questions – two questions which I ask of every scholar applying for a position with our institution. The first is innocent enough: “How important is racial/ethnic diversity in your scholarship and teaching?” Not surprisingly, all enthusiastically answer in the affirmative. Then I ask my second question: “Which scholars and/or books from racial and ethnic minorities do you include on your syllabus and why?” Here is when the squirming begins, revealing the candidate’s lack of academic rigor.
Give Racism a Chance
I started the Slants nearly a decade ago because I wanted to change people’s assumptions about Asian Americans. When you combine the great discomfort that people have when talking about racial injustice to the fact that the Asian American experience is rarely considered in these discussions, I realized that opportunities to do so would be extremely rare. I wanted to give racism a chance—a chance for discussing its existence in a way that would be compelling, honest, and yet, subversive.
Not My Right: Black Gun Ownership and Equality
Many Americans view self-defense as a natural right. However, African Americans have a long history of being denied the right to armed protection in a society that has sought to undergird white supremacy.
“Give Cheerfully, Give Abundantly”: White American Prosperity Evangelism, Financial Obedience, and Religious Corruption in the Trump Era
As we continue in the struggle for economic justice, it is important to examine how white Christian evangelism shapes our efforts to alleviate poverty. Casting poverty as a form of moral failing encourages people to disengage from the social, cultural, and structural causes of poverty and ignores the role that white Americans play in the global proliferation of poverty conditions worldwide.
The Design of the Everyday Diversity Industrial Complex
We must cast a critical eye toward the diversity conversation within the tech industry as it impacts who’s employed in that industry, the types of products they produce, who writes about those products, who those products are made for, and who benefits from those products.
Broken Windows, Shattered Lives: Mapping Technology and Policing Failures in Giuliani’s New York
While it is not fair to say that technology is bad, the New York City Police Department (NYPD), with its deployment of geospatial software for crime analysis in the 1990s, provides an example of how technology can become dangerous.
Erasure is a Slippery Slope
There is a narrative of racism that permeates all of Decatur, Georgia that goes much deeper than a stone monument.
