Tag
Race
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“Could I be an Asian girl?”: Racist Fantasy in HBO’s “The White Lotus”
Portraying the fall of the mighty is easy money, low-hanging fruit. Eat the rich! What’s riskier and harder to swallow are the moments when the viewer comes into contact with the white elite’s racist fantasies, which include the tendencies of prestige TV and its insufficient depictions of people of color.
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“Flawed from the Outset”: Sonali Thakkar on the UN’s 1950 Attempt to Redefine Race
Liberal antiracism has been undermined precisely because it doesn’t answer the real questions that we care about.
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Rethinking Reconstruction: Kate Masur on “Freedom Was in Sight”
“Freedom Was in Sight” conveys that even as Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow order took shape in the South, not everything was lost.
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Bad Beef
Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.
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To Counteract Apocalyptic Technoscience, We Need New Myths
If there is contentment on the artist’s face, it is because she knows that she has left Babylon behind and is on her way to Zion.
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What Is the Infrastructure of Critique?
The work of certain authors are infrastructuring critique: building new models of critique, which foreground how infrastructure is not just an object of concern, but a methodology for contemporary scholarship.
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White Suburbs and Drug Wars
To understand the racism of the drug war, in other words, we must look to the ways policymakers sought to protect white suburban youth.
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Pieces of the Past at the Doctors House: Glendale, California
The house may appear as a mere physical artifact, but it contains larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.
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Tenuous Privileges, Tenuous Power
In “The Vice President’s Black Wife,” Amrita Myers paints freedom as a process in which Black women used the tools available to them to secure rights and privileges within a slave society.
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Politics—Not Tech—Can Save Black Jobs from AI
Don’t plan to make individuals retrain for new jobs. Instead, build a society that upholds the lives of everyone.
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“Remaindered Life”: Durba Mitra in Conversation with Neferti Tadiar
“The survival of the world depends on the gendered work of subsistence and reproduction, carried out predominantly by women in the global South.”
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Fixing Nostalgia: “Star Trek” Boldly Goes to Less Utopian Futures
“Picard” is perhaps the least utopian of any “Star Trek” media. But’s that because its political pragmatism shows how to build a better reality.
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B-Sides: Joyce Carol Oates’s “them”
“‘Them’ remakes the naturalist tradition of novels for a society that seems … incapable of ending an addiction to racist violence.”
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B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt”
“Whitehead’s satire takes aim … at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.”
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Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’”
“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”
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Alejandro Varela on “The Town of Babylon” and “The People Who Report More Stress”
Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, you’ll hear our interview with Alejandro Varela about his books The Town of Babylon and The People Who Report More Stress, both published by…
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B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
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Out of the Closet—and into the Coffin
Interview with the Vampire uses vampirism to reveal fantasies & fears of the social contagiousness of interracial & homosexual desires.
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Nonprofit Neighborhoods: How Not to Fight Poverty
Wishing to end poverty “wherever it existed,” LBJ acted not with government aid, but with a non-profit. The results have been catastrophic.
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Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
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Car Creditocracy: An Interview with Julie Livingston & Andrew Ross
“If you are a car owner, you are red meat for whoever wants to prey upon you, whether it is police, auto lenders, or state agencies.”
