Category: Race and Ethnicity in America
-
It’s almost that time of year again—and we don’t just mean Halloween. The eagerly anticipated fifth season of the American Horror Story anthology on the FX television channel is ready to air. AHS is something of a guilty pleasure for the two of us, not least for its superb casts, vivid (if grotesque) blending of…
-
By Ronnie Greene Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Danziger Bridge shootings. Ronnie Greene’s Shots on the Bridge was released on the same day the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed an order granting the officers a new trial based on misconduct by prosecutors that judges said tainted the officers’ trial back in…
-
By Premilla Nadasen Nearly eighty years ago, Margaret Mitchell published what would become a best-selling novel, Gone with the Wind. More than thirty million copies have sold worldwide, and in 1939, the film adaptation was released. The novel tells the tale of a young white woman slaveholder, Scarlett O’Hara, who struggles to come to terms…
-
By Tom Wooten Georgia Johnson's new home. Photo credit: Tom Wooten Georgia Johnson, the great-grandmother, expert wordsmith, and longtime Lower Ninth Ward resident about whom I wrote in We Shall Not Be Moved, has not followed an easy path to recovery. When I interviewed her for the book in October 2008, she sat happily in…
-
On September 4, 2005, eight years before the #BlackLivesMatter movement was born, officers of the New Orleans Police Department opened fire on two families crossing the Danziger Bridge. Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the city six days before. The officers were on site for an unrelated distress call. All the innocent victims were black and unarmed.…
-
By Bill Ayers Photo credit: Eduardo Montes-Bradley This blog post appeared originally in Critical Inquiry. Last year my students—Chicago teachers and teachers-to-be, educators from a range of backgrounds and experiences and orientations—all read The Beautiful Struggle. I’d put Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir on the list of required readings because I thought it was a fitting and…
-
By Kay Whitlock This is the second part of the two-part discussion of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman begun on July 17 with Michael Bronski's blog piece. *** What is always at stake in a contest of imaginations is the question of whose lives matter. —Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics …
-
By Michael Bronski This blog post is one of two about the publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. To read part two, Kay Whitlock's follow-up on the conversation, click here. *** American readers love stories of political uplift and inspiration rather than forthright, bluntly honest accounts of unpalatable truths and realities. They especially love them when…
