As Black History Month comes to a close I’d like to spend a few minutes addressing controversy over Black Lives Matter being used in the teaching of black history. This discussion must include a brief explanation of the purpose of history education in the schools, the growing cowardice of school administrators across the country, and […]

Read more "Is Black Lives Matter Too Political For the Schools?"

Conor Friedersdorf’s How the Conservative Movement Enabled the Rise of Donald Trump over at The Atlantic today is a must-read. In it he details something I have been shouting since last summer– that the space for Donald Trump’s vacuous populism was created by the GOP selling their soul to the right-wing infotainment complex. Conservative establishment talking heads […]

Read more "Creating a Monster"

File this story from Gawker under “I” for insane. In response to faculty concerns that Texans who legally own firearms will be allowed to carry their weapons on campus starting August 1 this year the University of Houston held a “campus carry dialog” where they discussed the dangers of armed students. You see, students on […]

Read more "How Not to Get Murdered on a Concealed Carry Campus in Texas"

I caused a bit of a dust up back home with my piece “Why I Can Never Go Home Again.” A range of people reached out to me via Facebook, email, and text. The overwhelming majority were positive, saying I had captured the essence of their experience (white and black) and the sense of disappointment […]

Read more "God, Guns, and Glory"

Americans, on a whole, are ahistorical thinkers. Despite our professions of love for the past, most of us have little knowledge of the traditions, competing ideologies, and causal factors that formed the world we live in. Where we invoke the past, we typically do so in shallow, presentist terms. This tendency leads us to make a […]

Read more "Jacksonian America"

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap […]

Read more "Remembering the Dead"

I was born and raised in Lima, Ohio. And in many ways, I’ve never left. Home weighs heavily on us all. Our early experiences deeply influence the way we see and understand the world around us. I had a charmed upbringing– safe, comfortable, and loved. My parents encouraged me in everything I did. They bought […]

Read more "Why I Can Never Go Home Again"

The bloated, self-referential, corporate orgasm that is the Super Bowl has come and gone again. It brought with it all the usual nonsense– contrived “storylines” like the exuberant, emotional, athletic stylings of Cam Newton vs. the stoic, studied, precision of Peyton Manning (a narrative that didn’t even bother hiding its naked, insipid racism– wonderfully mocked by […]

Read more "Legitimacy in Policing"

Parul Sehgal, senior editor of the New York Times Book Review, wrote a wonderful piece on erasure in American culture yesterday. Sehgal makes a compelling case that we lack the capacity for imagining more than a single narrative (primarily that of the straight, white, Christian male), which is made evident across our artistic spectrum– from media coverage of crime to […]

Read more "Erasure and Black History Month"

Yesterday, conservative theologian R. R. Reno wrote an editorial for the New York Times entitled “How Both Parties Lost the White Middle Class.” For Reno, the populism of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is the result of a broken covenant between the two parties and the white majority. The fear and anxiety of the white middle class, who […]

Read more "Losing the White Middle Class"