Top Menu

Subjects Archives: Race

Nazi flag flies from Austrian legation in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 1938 (New York Public Library) .

How American racism shaped nazism

Depending on the reader’s perspective, Whitman’s central argument seems either modest or bold, as he claims, “What all this research unmistakably reveals is that the Nazis did find precedents and parallels and inspirations in the United States” (10). The most radical Nazis were often the most enthused about American legal precedents. More moderate, less anti-Semitic […]

Continue Reading
White people; Viewing the Performance of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in the Globe Theatre (1840) by David Scott. Photo courtesy the V&A Musuem

How ‘white people’ were invented by a playwright in 1613

The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed. The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: ‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of […]

Continue Reading
Making Black Lives Matter in our schools (Damon Davis)

Making ‘Black Lives Matter’ in our schools

How do you kill Mr. Phil and nothing happens?” According to parent Zuki Ellis, this is the question students at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in St. Paul were asking just a few days into summer. On June 16, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, or Mr. Phil as students knew […]

Continue Reading
Oakland Raiders teammates kneel during the national anthem, Sep. 24, 2017

Take a knee: The revenge of Colin Kaepernick

After Trump’s deranged demand that ownership purge NFL athletes who fail a loyalty test, it felt a little miraculous when, by a quirk of a game being played in London, Sunday morning dawned on the vision of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Baltimore Ravens arm in arm during the National Anthem. Standing with them was Shahid […]

Continue Reading
Activist being handcuffed in Berkley antifa protests

Thugs and journalists

The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.

Continue Reading
Right-wing protestors flying the Nazi flag along with the the Confederate flag

Fascism in the United States

The combination of the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag is a standard feature of the Right’s iconography—the linkage between a desire for White domination with a rehabilitation of the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy. This period of great economic instability has produced some truly morbid symptoms.

Continue Reading