Racial oppression
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On Charleston, the morning after.
tl;dr — This is horrible. To anyone who lost someone yesterday, & to anyone who finds the world a little more terrifying after seeing this in the news, you have my sincerest condolences, although I know they count for very little. I’m sorry. ************************ Given that I’ve written several posts about race & racial conflict…
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On Alice Goffman’s ‘On the Run’ and extrapolate-able truth.
Many people have criticized Alice Goffman’s ethnography On the Run. The first set of criticisms I noticed were from people who claimed that she misrepresented black urban life by studying the particular group of people on whom she centered her book (examples here and here). Now Goffman is being accused of felony-level crimes and, by virtue…
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On Welcome to Braggsville and…
Because it’s a tragicomic collegiate novel about racism (hey! I wrote one of those too!), I’ve been looking forward to reading Welcome to Braggsville for a while. And, praise be to the local library, I finally got my chance! Thank you, library. Thank you, T. Geronimo Johnson, for caring about these issues enough to write…
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On justice (an essay for Z).
“In Egypt, we are all about justice. Justice, justice, justice. Where ever you go, people are in the streets. There are tanks.” I was crouching in front of a swingset, gently pushing my daughter back each time she arced forward to nearly kick me in the head. Z was standing beside me, talking politics. It…
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On the potential psychological ramifications of certain insular societies, or: that fraternity video in the news.
After N woke up from her nap, I strapped her into the jogging stroller and took her to the local playground. Holding my hands, she stomped around while I dripped on her: a sudden blast of warm air from the south brought summer-like weather to our town today. Then, after about twenty minutes of stomping,…
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More on violence against women … sexism, in particular.
This is second in a series. Find the first essay here. Given that I’ve been writing about violence against women in a university setting, it’s probably worth slapping together an essay about the paucity of female professors, specifically in the sciences. And this is something that’s been addressed quite often, so quite possibly you’ve read a…
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On civil forfeiture, racial profiling, and outlawing self-harm.
I spent most of breakfast today blathering about civil forfeiture. So K claimed I should write an essay about it. I thought that sounded ridiculous, because I figured everyone already knew about it. Indeed, a brief internet search revealed that even John Oliver did an extended piece on it; sure, we don’t have a television,…
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On elegant sledgehammering.
Here’s a tiny piece of Paul Dunbar’s “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.” You can read the whole poem here , or, if you like listening more than reading, there are a couple renditions up on Youtube. An’ de lan’ shall hyeah his thundah Lak a blas’ from Gab’el’s ho’n. Fu’ de Lawd of hosts is mighty When…
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On losing good words.
“I just lost ‘troglodyte.’” “What?” “It was probably my favorite insult back in high school. I’d, like, you know how people make fun of people for reading the dictionary? I never did that, but I’d read through the thesaurus during English class, and that one was in the list for ‘idiot.’ ” “Sure.” “But, right,…
Frank Brown Cloud 