Race matters. Despite what you may hear from people like Ron DeSantis or the hosts on Fox News. Race matters in the United States.
The numbers are clear. Race predicts class, and together they predict educational and economic possibilities and outcomes.
The murder of four African-Americans in Jacksonville was just the latest reminder, as two recent essays remind us.
Esau McCauley writes in “An American Tragedy at Dollar General”:
These three people didn’t die because someone hated Dollar General any more than the Black people in Buffalo perished because some madman had a beef with the produce department, or any more than Ahmaud Arbery lost his life because of fury at runners. The three African American people at the Dollar General were killed for the same reason the Black churchgoers of Mother Emanuel were slain. They died because they were Black in a country that still produces white supremacists intent on hatred and death.
T Anansi Wilson Writes in “Ron DeSantis’s Florida is a dangerous and hostile place for Black Americans”:
This reality is not the consequence of one white supremacist in Jacksonville, however. It is the culmination of a dog-whistle politics hellbent on using public policy, social disorder and white racial grievance to terrorize, subordinate and eliminate Black people from public and political life.
We speak of promise, but the promise is attacked at all turns, as Chris Vognar writes in “Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem”:
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West Virginia offers another example of how neoliberalism’s assault on higher education is making us dumber.
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Intriguing piece by Naomi Klein on what drives otherwise rational liberal-left intellectuals over to the dark side. She uses her “doppelgänger,” Naomi Wolf, as a case in point.
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Rereading some formative (for me) psychological and philosophical works, both as response to recent losses and as part of a project that incorporates memoir, Kerouac and the Beats, and other influences.
I read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death at Rutgers in Professor Warren Shapiro’s Anthropology of Religion class. I don’t think I appreciated it at the time, but it s basic thesis, that our consciousness of death drives our behaviors, makes sense.
Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus makes many of the same claims, as does Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in Man Is Not Alone.
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And finally, an excellent essay by Esther Allen on one of my favorite ports, Roque Dalton.