Mount Tamalpais College
Mount Tamalpais College Read More »
Documentary about the Albany Bulb before, during, and immediately after its emptying.
Of all the memes I've seen today on social media about the uprisings throughout the United States... This one stole my 💜! Sending revolutionary solidarity from a little island nearby. #Minneapolis #patRIOTic pic.twitter.com/34S9sKsfkn
— Melisa M13 Rivière (@Emetrece) June 2, 2020
Yesterday, my 14-year-old cousin said, “We’re living through a social studies chapter†and I can’t stop thinking about that, about him, about how young people are processing this moment.
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) June 2, 2020
Social Studies Chapter Read More »
Of all the images of the Oakland protest, I like this one best. pic.twitter.com/jPYNdNFV65
— 🌳 (@OKcouncil) May 30, 2020
"Why I Miss George W. Bush" -- Mehdi Hasan in the New York Times, November 30, 2015:
Minorities matter — in general, if not primary, elections. A study commissioned by the Republican National Committee in the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat noted how “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.†To be sure, Muslims constitute just 1 to 2 percent of voters in the United States, but in 2000, when the presidential election turned on just 537 votes in Florida, more than 46,000 Muslims in that state voted Republican. In the view of the influential conservative activist Grover Norquist, “George W. Bush was elected president of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.â€
Mr. Bush’s foreign policy may have harmed Muslims abroad, but at home he courted Muslim-American voters and refused to lazily conflate Islam with terrorism. Mourning Mr. Bush’s re-election in 2004, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith remarked: “I never thought I would ever long for Ronald Reagan.†I recognize the sentiment, as I listen to the irresponsible Muslim-hating rhetoric of the current crop of candidates.
I never thought I’d say it, but now I long for the Republican Party of George W. Bush.
Why He Misses George W. Bush Read More »
Michael Eric Dyson, "Where Do We Go after Ferguson?" (New York Times, November 29, 2014):
On Tuesday, the president doubled down on his indictment of “criminal acts†and declared, “I do not have any sympathy†for those who destroy “your own communities.†While he avoided saying so, it was clear that his remarks were directed at the black people who looted and rioted in Ferguson. But their criminal activity is the effect of going unrecognized by the state for decades, a crime in itself. As for the plague of white cops who kill unarmed black youth, the facts of which are tediously and sickeningly repetitive and impose a psychological tariff on black minds, the president was vague, halting and sincerely noncommittal.
Instead, he lauded the racial progress that he said he had witnessed “in my own life,†substituting his life for ours, and signaled again how his story of advancement was ours, suggesting, sadly, that the sum of our political fortunes in his presidency may be lesser than the parts of our persistent suffering. Even when he sidled up to the truth and nudged it gently — “these are real issues,†the president acknowledged — he slipped back into an emotional blandness that underplayed the searing divide, saying there was “an impression that folks have†about unjust policing and “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.â€
Whose impression is it, though that word hardly captures the fierce facts of the case? Who feels it? Who is the subject? Who is the recipient of the action? Mr. Obama’s treacherous balancing act between white and black, left and right, obscures who has held the power for the longest amount of time to make things the way they are. This is something, of course, he can never admit, but which nevertheless strains his words and turns an often eloquent word artist into a faltering, fumbling linguist. President Obama said that our nation was built on the rule of law. That is true, but incomplete. His life, and his career, too, are the product of broken laws: His parents would have committed a crime in most states at the time of their interracial union, and without Martin Luther King Jr. breaking what he deemed to be unjust laws, Mr. Obama wouldn’t be president today. He is the ultimate paradox: the product of a churning assault on the realm of power that he now represents.
No wonder he turns to his own body and story and life to narrate our bodies, our stories and our lives. The problem is that the ordinary black person possesses neither his protections against peril nor his triumphant trajectory that will continue long after he leaves office.
Obama after Ferguson Read More »