Skip to content

The slave trade and global inequality

There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past.
One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather [...]

“You speak treason.” “Fluently.”

Many academics know about the great book by Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. However, I think it’s not common knowledge outside of academics who specialize in race that he’s been involved in two journals, Race Traitor and The New Abolitionist, both focusing on undoing white privilege by abolishing whiteness. This is all old [...]

See it. Film it. Change it. Blog about it.

Project Witness provides training and video cameras for local groups to use in their human rights advocacy campaigns. They have recently begun releasing these videos online. Check out US films like Outlawed, Rights on the Line, or The Day After Diallo, or focus your attention on the international scene: Between Two Fires dwells [...]

I now know what the white supremacist would say.

“A few weeks ago” is beginning to be the expected delay in these posts.
Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here, where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people. In response, [...]

Just asking

I’m very interesting in the way questions are framed. Here’s an interesting set of questions from the Guardian’s Gary Younge, who seems similarly interested:
Do you think of yourself as white or British or both? Does it worry you that you got your job just because of your race? Where are you from? No, but really? [...]