Roundup

The United States Needs to Drop the National Prayer Breakfast

by Anthea Butler

Organized by a secretive Christian nationalist organization, the National Prayer Breakfast is an annual ritual that has no place in the political culture of a multicultural democracy. 

The Roundup Top Ten for February 4, 2022

The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week. 

The Return of the Mass Protest

by Elizabeth Hinton

Although mass protests are far more peaceful than they were in the 1960s, reviving nonviolent direct action tactics associated with MLK, the police response to them has been more heavily armed and violent.

How America's Two Pandemics Merged

by Tom Engelhardt

In pandemics past, disease was the single contagion threatening society; today there is also a pandemic of political nihilism. 

Let History's Chips Fall Where They May

by Walter Kamphoefner

Neither prescriptive patriotism nor the most dire diagnoses of racism offer a point of departure for students, particularly white students, to recognize injustice and imagine they can change it. 

Conservatives' Opposition to Yet-Unnamed SCOTUS Nominee Shows the Right's Siege Mentality

by Thomas Zimmer

If Joe Biden follows through on a pledge to nominate a Black woman to the high court, it won't change the ideological tilt on the bench, but it will highlight that white men still dominate powerful institutions and that conservative politics is concerned with preserving that dominance. 

Book Bans Target Teaching the History of Oppression

by Marilisa Jiménez Garcia

Children, particularly those who are part of minority groups, have never been spared from horrors, in history or today. The rhetoric of book-banners is rooted in a privileged viewpoint and serves the interests of inequality today.

Politics Dictating What Teachers Can Say About Racism is Dangerous

by Robert Cohen

A University of Georgia math professor asked his students to write reflective essays after whites rioted over the school's desegregation in 1961. The results show the dire consequences that follow when teachers are afraid controversial lessons will cost them their jobs.

Wishful Thinking on COVID is as Dangerous as Prior Episodes of Denial

by Gregg Gonsalves

A convergence has emerged between the right and the center that the Omicron variant is the last hurrah of the COVID pandemic and a signal to go back to "normal." A public health scholar warns this is potentially sacrificing the vulnerable to the wishes of the powerful.

Who's Afraid of Isolationism?

by Stephen Wertheim

It's past time for "isolationism" to stop being a dirty word in discussing America's relationship to the world. The use of the term as a pejorative has justified too many ill-considered military interventions.

Black History Month Reveals the Deception Behind White "Discomfort"

by Peniel E. Joseph

"The erroneous narrative that teaching Black history provokes anxiety, discomfort, guilt or anger for White children has insidious roots" in a false consensus that has long suppressed the stories of Americans of color and denied racial oppression.

Whoopi Goldberg's Confusion about Racism and the Holocaust Matters Because it's Common

by Jonathan Zimmerman

The TV host's remarks about the Holocaust illustrate the pervasive hold of the idea that race is a biological fact instead of a set of social categories that have changed across time and place. Historians should take this moment to educate rather than condemn. 

How 18th C. Quakers Led a Sugar Boycott Against Slavery

by Julie L. Holcomb

"In the 1780s, British and American Quakers launched an extensive and unprecedented propaganda campaign against slavery and slave-labor products."

A Mournful Legacy: Ukraine and the Recovery of Moral Realism

by Andrew Bacevich

Joe Biden should revisit David Halberstam's classic "The Best and the Brightest" to remember what happens when people mistake their own ideological preferences for savvy and realistic pragmatism as he contemplates intervention in Ukraine. 

Now Conservatives are the "Discomfort Police"

by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

The left should not be surprised to see the right weaponizing the concept of discomfort to justify a spate of legislation restricting the teaching of difficult historical subjects around race and historical conflict. 

After a Record of Distinction and Mentorship on the Bench, it's Time for a Black Woman Justice

by Angela Robinson

Questions about qualifications privilege the Federal appellate court system as a pipeline to SCOTUS; the legacy of mentorship and service of Black women on a variety of courts, affecting the everyday lives of Americans, should not be undervalued. 

The Islamophobia of Domestic Security and the Capitol Insurrection

by Juan Cole

Perhaps if the FBI hadn't been spending the last 20 years spying on American Muslims the organizing of white Christian nationalists leading to to the January 6 assault on the Capitol would't have been an apparent surprise to the authorities. 

Let's Not Allow the Great Powers to Destroy the World

by Lawrence Wittner

Historically, vast military resources have made nations more, not less, eager for military confrontation. The risk is too great today to allow a revival of great power rivalry. 

Reducing Child Poverty Is a No-Brainer even Without Brain Science

by Mical Raz

Reducing child poverty is a good in itself; justifying policies to reduce poverty in terms of improvements in measures of cognition or IQ scores makes such programs vulnerable to backlash and risks validating racist and eugenicist arguments about race and intelligence.

Greening Detroit's History

by Brandon Ward

Urban historians are starting to recognize something that urban activists grasped in the 1960s: power and inequality are reflected in cities' environments.