White mob violence against black people and their homes and businesses was the far more common variety of race riot, from the first rising of the K.K.K., after the Civil War, through the second, in[…]
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Category: Races in America
“The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage…”
If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate gave him the white nationalist[…]
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“White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis…”
Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and, until we do, we will fail to understand[…]
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“If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them”
One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and[…]
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“The charting system was predicated on a segregated market”
Rock and roll is usually explained as rhythm-and-blues music—that is, music performed by black artists for black listeners – repurposed by mostly white artists for a mostly white audience. How do we know this? Because[…]
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“Contrary to our popular assumptions about the intent and effect of both the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, they were not intended to, nor did they, provide all poor Americans with equal economic opportunity”
Up through at least the middle of the twentieth century, the government of the United States and various American institutions pursued economic policies that benefited whites and largely excluded African Americans. It was the Jews’[…]
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“The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects…but the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life”
The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s[…]
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“…if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone”
I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice,[…]
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“Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it”
The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal interpretation[…]
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“The ‘authenticity’ that Trump’s followers so admire is factually wrong and morally repulsive”
If racial injustice is considered to be monolithic and unchanging—omitting the context of individual actions, white and black—the political response tends to be equally rigid: genuflection or rejection. Clinton’s constituency surely includes many voters who[…]
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