racism
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On the death of Thor.
If Thor could meet the white supremacists who praise him now, he’d surely die again of shame.
Aryan, Asatru, Christianity, Else Christensen, fate, feminism, Fenris Wolf, free will, Freya, Freya’s wedding, hate, heathen religions, Icelandic, Jeramy Dodds, Job, KKK, Loki, Midgard Serpent, misogyny, Noah, Norse, Norse gods, Norse mythology, Norse myths, Norse religion, Odin, odinism, Odinist, paganism, poetic devices, Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, racism, Ragnarok, religion, shame, slavery, Thor, Thor’s wedding, Viking, wedding of Thor, white supremacist, white supremacists, white supremacy, Yahweh, ZOG
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On sexuality: dolphins.
Where ambiguity isn’t safe, people can be only portions of themselves.
AB, An Aquarium, Aryan Brotherhood, bisexual, CAConrad, criminal justice, desire, dolphin, dolphin sex, dolphins, Enkidu, gay, Gilgamesh, homophobia, homosexuality, human sexuality, identity, internet, jail poetry, Jeffrey Yang, poem, poetry, punishment, Queer, racism, Roman soldiers, samurai, sexual identity, sexuality, sexuality in jail, sexuality in prison, Spencer Reece, teaching in jail, The Road to Emmaus, While Standing in Line for Death, white supremacy
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On driving.
If you know you’re safe from the police, why not zip along? Get where you’re going faster! But these small choices feed injustice.
america’s original sin, Bill of Rights, Black Lives Matter, Car Wars, City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, Civil forfeiture, constitutional law, cops, David Harris, Douglas Husak, driving, ESPN First Take, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fourth Amendment’s Death on the Highway, illegal stops, impeding traffic, Indiana Prisoners’ Writing Workshop, injustice, institutional racism, jim wallis, Justice Marshall, Justice Sotomayor, marijuana, Mark Schlereth, mass incarceration, Michelle Alexander, Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, minority rights, overcriminalization, Pages to Prisoners, paraphernalia, police, policing, quintet of hate machines, racial injustice, racism, Rikers, Second Amendment, segregation, solitary confinement, speed limits, Stephen A. Smith, Strieff dissent, Supreme Court, The Bail Trap, The New Jim Crow, transporting alcohol, Tyrone Tomlin, unreasonable search and seizure, Utah v. Strieff, war on cops, War on Drugs, white privilege, Whren v. United States
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On fish (and their similarities to us).
We so often denigrate the capacities of presumed others. It’s much harder to exploit those whom you know feel.
animal cognition, animal learning, animal models of human psychiatric disorders, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, brain science, Descartes was wrong, differences between life in water and on land, dogs, fish, fish feel pain, Frans de Waal, Jonathan Balcombe, leopard gecko, mistreatment of animals, neural plasticity, Project Prakash, racism, Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, the evolution of intelligence, the suffering of others, What a Fish Knows
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On the shifting sands of family, specifically: whose counts?
*These* heroin users have families? How is that any different from the addicts who came before?
addiction, children, developmental biology, drug trade, drug users have families too, family, Francis Slay, Gangster Warlords, graduate school, heroin, incarceration crisis, Ioan Grillo, Lean In, life without law enforcement, mass incarceration, mouse lemur, opiates, painkillers, racism, rehab instead of prison, treatment instead of prison, unethical hiring practices, violence in St. Louis, War on Drugs, working mothers
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On depictions of (non)violence for the cause of justice.
Graphic novelist Nate Powell, alongside his March co-authors John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, will be speaking in Bloomington next month. I’m excited about the talk. I first learned about Powell’s work by reading The Silence of Our Friends about the civil rights movement in Texas. That book was especially meaningful for me because I’m generally non-confrontational, preferring…
Andrew Aydin, armed rebellion, Between the World and Me, Charles Deslondes, civil rights movement, graphic novels, human violence, John Lewis, March, March book one, March graphic novel, Nat Turner, Nate Powell, nonviolence, protest, racism, racist high school history curriculum, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Silence of Our Friends, violent rebellion against slavery, when is violence justified -
On racism and the empathy gap (while sneakily building toward the idea that teaching kids to root for your favorite sports team might be kinda evil).
There is an unfortunately compelling evolutionary model to explain why humans are so predisposed to racism. The rotten treatment of presumed outsiders may well be a corollary of our genetic inducements toward altruism. Which is grimly ironic, the idea that the same evolutionary narrative could explain both the best & worst sides of human nature. In…
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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,…
Frank Brown Cloud 