Thinking of the Mary McLeod Bethune memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park in tandem with the controversial Emancipation memorial suggests ways in which commemorative spaces can operate as places of dialogue.
For a long time it seemed as though the 1930s era of high unemployment was a kind of “great exception” in American history, but now it has appeared again, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as it did in the early 1930s.
White liberal allies to today's Black protest movements must dig in for the long haul and remember the words of Audre Lorde: "The war against dehumanization is ceaseless."
Over time American nature has been retrofitted with an infrastructure of racism, one that gives some people open access to land, clean water, and good air while constricting the access of others to these vital natural resources, or takes them away altogether.
Closed gates around City Hall Park in New York not only restrict access to the park as a site for protest, but ignore the site's history as a theater for political expression.
The dire crises facing humanity--climate change, pandemic disease, widespread pollution, and nuclear weapons, to name a few--demand that we reject a fatalistic sense of impotence and the legacies of nationalism that prevent cooperative solutions.
We must now develop a long-overdue Patriotism Index to quantitatively distinguish real Americans from the many poseurs and potential enemies who lurk among us.
As we celebrate America’s birthday on July 4th, let’s remember how our nation’s generosity has aided many hungry and oppressed people around the world.
People have a right to walk around their neighborhood park without being terrorized by iconography devoted to people who denied their ancestors human rights.
Do recent protests against the symbols of racism--monuments and statues--reflect a political movement that can easily be absorbed by today's multicultural corporations, or will that energy sustain a push to fundamentally reform American capitalism too?
The anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which finally eliminated slavery in the entire United States, should be made a national holiday.
McCarthy rode a wave of bullying and bluster until it broke back on him. Trump has advantages as president that McCarthy didn't, but faces the same problem: his tactics will work until they don't.
The history of liberal law-and-order reveals that procedural reforms implemented on top of a structure of policing that has been empowered to protect property and control “disorder” are not only doomed to fail but will produce the conditions for more protest and resistance.
Until white Americans reckon with the significance of white supremacy in America, they will deflect a sense of responsibility by laying blame for black suffering on black Americans themselves.
The viral video of the confrontation between birder Christian Cooper and dog walker Amy Cooper in Central park illuminates how nature and race have been constructed in America, giving privileged access to some while turning others into eternal trespassers.
Marian Sims's 1942 historical novel Beyond Surrender was not nearly as popular as Gone with the Wind. But it reminds us today of a history that might have been--both during Reconstruction and in the popular portrayal of the period.
Joseph Biden is urged to remember John F. Kennedy's admiration and celebration of achievement and Franklin Roosevelt's spirit of pragmatic experimentation in his campaign. Should he be elected, he'll need inspiration to lead the nation out of dire circumstances.
