The Body Cam Trade-Off
Challenging police violence shouldn’t require black Americans to sacrifice their privacy. Read my piece on this topic at Jacobin.
Cops just shot my cousin dead: Here’s why talking about it is quietly destructive
My cousin Charles, an unarmed black man, was recently shot and killed by an off-duty police officer. Read my piece about it on Salon here.
Voting is Not Enough: An Analysis of “True South” and Black American Electoral Politics
Ben Jealous and The Center for American Progress recently released True South: Unleashing Democracy in the Black Belt 50 Years After Freedom Summer,a report on politics in the Black Belt. True South demonstrates that an effective voter registration drive in the South could shift the balance of power in some states from Republican to Democrat.…
Justin Bieber is racist, and I don’t care: More on the TMZification of Racial Politics
Justin Bieber is racist (twice), and I don’t care. Donald Sterling is racist, and I don’t care. The supervisor at an industrial cotton gin is racist, and I don’t care. Some lady in a parking lot is racist, and I don’t care.
Donald Sterling and the TMZification of Racial Politics
I don’t even know where to start with this Donald Sterling thing… If you’re reading this you probably already heard the first and/or second recording of what is alleged to be Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling having a racist argument with his girlfriend. His statements, but more so the reaction to them, are extremely illustrative…
Chris Christie and the Media’s Race and Class Bias
If you follow mainstream American news media, chances are that you’ve heard about Bridgegate. Basically, 2 of the 3 lanes which connect Fort Lee, New Jersey to the George Washington Bridge were closed for 4 days in September. While the closure was explained as a “traffic study,” it has since been revealed that the lanes…
Symbolic Solidarity: How Gap (and Other Corporations) Use Symbolism to Maintain the Status Quo
Earlier this week, Arsalan Iftikhar, a prominent Muslim commentator, tweeted a picture of a defaced Gap subway ad. The ad is part of Gap’s “Make Love” campaign and featured the Sikh actor and jewelry designer Waris Ahluwalia. A skilled graffiti artist had crossed out the “Love” and replaced it with “Bombs!” and had also editorialized…
The Diamond Economy
I’m a fancy grad student now. That means that I spend all of my free time drawing indifference curves, calculating z-scores, and using words like “problematic,” “hegemony,” and “navigate.” It also means that I don’t have as much time to write blog posts (sorry, world). The good news about being a grad student, however, is…
Power for Trayvon (Part 2)
I wrote about the calls of “Justice for Trayvon” last March when black America was in an uproar because George Zimmerman still hadn’t been arrested and charged with a crime. As tends to happen when people take to the streets and pressure the system from the outside, the powers that be responded. Zimmerman was arrested…
5 Lessons Learned from the Edward Snowden Saga
One June 5th, The Guardian published the first of a series of articles that have shed light on the breadth of the US government’s unconstitutional (but in many instances legal) surveillance programs. Further stories from The Guardian, The Washington Post, The South China Morning Post, and Der Spiegel have helped reveal that the US government…
The Media’s Silence on Institutional Racism
Racially charged controversies have dominated mainstream media for the last two weeks. First was the Paula Deen fiasco in which the cooking show host has been exposed as being a good ol’ fashioned racist. I don’t know exactly when that story broke because I don’t really care about it (I’ll explain why later in this…
ReignFall 