I’ve been busy traveling for work, so this is not as prompt as I would like, but I would like to continue the conversation about liberalism and white supremacy that we started last week. The controversy over Bernie Sanders remarks regarding reparations and the half-hearted way that liberals address issues of race seemed to confuse […]

Read more "Divisive Rhetoric and the Mythology of the Dunning School"

Killer Mike rose to the defense of Bernie Sanders with a series of tweets in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates piece “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?” The exchange between Killer Mike and TNC is great– this is what political disagreements are supposed to look like. I wrote a little about liberals fundamental problem with […]

Read more "Liberal America’s Ignorance of White Supremacy (redux)"

Anyone who has been a part of my life in the last five years knows that I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best writer in America. His technical skill, his biting wit, and his towering intellect are a credit to his profession. His notoriety, at least among educated Americans, is proof that quality discourse and […]

Read more "How Liberals Fundamentally Don’t Get White Supremacy"

Students in schools across the nation will pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. this week. His likeness will appear in your Google search bar. Tribute will be paid, in the form of feel good highlights of “our” successes in overcoming racism and sadness from the tragedy of his assassination. Most will hear a piece […]

Read more "MLK and the Problem with Calls for “Law and Order”"

Last night’s GOP debate was an ugly affair. There was the customary anti-Obama nonsense: like Chris Christie threatening to kick the President’s butt out of the White House next year (ignoring the fact that he is Constitutionally bound to leave office anyway), Ted Cruz and Christie calling Obama a petulant child, and Marco Rubio’s fantastical claim that […]

Read more "Nativism’s Long, Ugly History in American Politics"

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sotu Last night’s State of the Union address was vintage Obama. Soaring rhetoric, wry humor, towering confidence, and unguarded optimism– all the traits that so excited the electorate in 2008 were on full display in his final address to Congress. He covered a lot of ground. Economic development, innovation, environmental preservation, funding for education, and immigration […]

Read more "American Power and the Future of Democracy"

“The past,” John Lewis Gaddis wrote in The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, “is something we can never have.” As a moment shifts from present to past it becomes completely inaccessible to us. We cannot relive the moment. Nor can we recreate it as it was. We can only represent it. Where we stand, the lenses […]

Read more "Rivers of Time…"