Racism
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Stop Asking "Friends" to Confront Racism August 16, 2023
Like many children of the VHS era, I grew up rewinding the Star Wars trilogy box set, its paper casing worn and ripped after endless slumber parties and sick days. And then came 1997. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, George Lucas, the ...
A Six-Decade March August 11, 2023
Many Americans are having a hard time coming to grips with the bizarre transformation that has come over their country in recent years. It is almost as if they went to sleep a few years ago thinking they lived in a stable multi-ethnic democracy only ...
Are Vikings Too White? August 10, 2023
Idon’t always watch “Strongest Viking” competitions on cable. But the other day I was channel-hopping and became mesmerized by one. Firstly because I wasn’t previously aware that such banality was possible on television. People really watch men tryin...
The Little Mermaid is Disney Propaganda June 06, 2023
One of the musical highlights of the original, animated Little Mermaid is a scene in which Ariel, newly human, tries to get Prince Eric to kiss her. If he doesn’t, she’ll turn back into a mermaid, but because Ariel has lost her voice, her main job is...
The Role Reversal of R.F. Kuang’s 'Yellowface' June 01, 2023
The Asian American literary canon has always consisted of works about Asian authors’ insecurities around white people. The Joy Luck Club author and Asian American literature’s fairy godmother Amy Tan once wrote a nonfiction story titled “Fish Cheeks....
Know Your Enemies May 25, 2023
At the 2023 FIRE gala in New York City, the rapper Killer Mike gave a rousing keynote address describing how he learned the importance of free speech. He recounted once telling his grandfather that racists shouldn’t be allowed to use racial slurs. Hi...
How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors May 18, 2023
Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon. But the culture in which she was steepe...
Jackie Robinson Was More Than a Baseball Player May 15, 2023
Last month, Major League Baseball (MLB) celebrated Jackie Robinson Day, an annual event that the league debuted in 2004. Every April 15, each player wears Robinson’s number, 42, to honor the day he broke the baseball’s color barrier in 1947.For years...
Ewelldämmerung May 04, 2023
Some arguments are best suited for t-shirts, not books: any attempt to expand on them weakens them. Rarely is this phenomenon displayed more starkly than in Philip Ewell’s idea of “music theory’s white racial frame,” now stretched to book length in h...
Can You Escape Obesity? May 03, 2023
There are a few debates in our political discourse that seem cursed to polarisation. Take, for example, discussion of overpopulation, resource constraints, and environmentalism. The two options appear to be either the belief that the world is or will...
Your Childhood Just Died Again March 24, 2023
We’re spending all this money to fight Vladimir Putin but what about Mindy Kaling? From Democrats to Republicans, from Atlantic to Pacific, the nation has rarely been as united as it is in hatred of Kaling’s new animated HBO show Velma. The gory and ...
Let’s Debate the Real Melting Pot March 21, 2023
In a recent viral video hosted by VICE, a panel of young Asian Americans debated the notions of “model minorities” and “Asian Hate.” During the back-and-forth, one of the progressive panelists vigorously denounced assimilation in the US, linking it w...
The Passion of Scott Adams March 07, 2023
How do you imagine the woke beast? It is rough, surely, and slouches towards some unprofitable venue, so not Bethlehem. I think of it as something ravenous but episodic in its appetites, a sort of Polyphemus for hire. It gorges in a destructive frenz...
Chris Rock Brilliantly Rips into Wokeness March 06, 2023
For Chris Rock, Saturday night felt like his very own “Independence Day.”During his hysterical live Netflix special, “Selective Outrage,” the comedian finally let it rip in front of a surely huge at-home audience about the infamous 2022 Oscars at whi...
On the Suicide of Liberal Education March 03, 2023
The dust jacket of John Agresto’s new book, The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It, depicts Gore Hall at Harvard in the 1870s. Perhaps this is a subtle indication of what lies within: Gore Hall, ...
Wokeness Is Here To Stay February 23, 2023
ome claim that “wokeness” is on the wane. In fact, it is gradually being normalized, conformed to even by those who inwardly doubt it, and practiced by the majority of academic, corporate, and state institutions. This is why it deserves more than eve...
‘The 1619 Project’ on Hulu Vindicates Capitalism February 22, 2023
Hulu’s series “The 1619 Project” blames economic inequality between blacks and whites on “racial capitalism.” But almost every example presented is the result of government policies that, in purpose or effect, discriminated against African-Americans....
The Trouble With ‘White Privilege’ February 21, 2023
In 1935, while writing his masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois pondered the question of why, in the wake of the Civil War, there had not developed working-class solidarity across racial lines. “The South, after the war,” he ob...
All Anyone Can Do: A Midwestern Journalist’s Retrospective February 07, 2023
The distance travelled from Elvis to Trump is a lifetime. Which, like all history, is best appreciated in retrospect, and most rewarding when gleaned from first-hand accounts - provided these are forthright and, above all, well-written. These require...
Indie Gem a Victim of Woke Hollywood Mob February 06, 2023
Hollywood movies have become so formulaic, so degenerate, or so tediously woke that I’ve gone from seeing a movie a week and devotedly watching the Oscars to utter contempt.I want nothing to do with any of it. Don’t watch. Make a point of not watchin...
Boring Art, Impotent Politics February 01, 2023
In 2019, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Hank Willis Thomas was awarded a commission to create a sculpture celebrating the civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The monument was to be installed on Boston Common, America’s oldest public park, wher...
The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat October 10, 2022
Defacement is a beautiful painting—and an ugly one. Its alternative name, The Death of Michael Stewart, reveals its subject: a young Black man who died in police custody in 1983, after his arrest for allegedly writing graffiti on the wall of a subway...
A Skeptic Confronts False Prophets August 16, 2022
John McWhorter has written an important book—a heretical book, really, because in today’s America, black men are anathema if they believe what he believes, or write what he writes. McWhorter knows the bounds within which he is expected to live, but w...
The Limits of Black and White Thinking August 01, 2022
On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this month, the broadcaster Amol Rajan gave the most misguided opinion on a book I have heard this year: he described Ibram X Kendi’s bestselling How to Be an Antiracist as “complex”. Kendi is many things, but...
The One With The Nauseating White Guilt July 01, 2022
Marta Kauffman’s showy white shame is far more offensive than Friends’ white cast....
