Leigh M. Johnson

30% ? Really?

The Washington Post reported this weekend that “3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias.” It’s fairly amusing to watch this little piece cycle through the news channels today. Some of the reporters are saying “30% of Americans admit to race bias” like this: “Oh. My. God. There are RACISTS in this country! This is…

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Bandidos Yanquis

Since I’m spending most of my days writing about philosophy, I’ve decided to limit my writing on this blog to the topic of film for a little while. Today, the subject is another one of my favorites, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford (soundtrack, funny enough, by Burt Bacharach)….

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Tightening the Democratic Belt

Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, it’s time to officially move to the next stage in the Party’s game plan to take back the White House. Among other things, this means that we will (finally!) get a break from all of the intra-family fighting and the supporters of both…

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Healthy Blogging

This is a very happy day in the blogosphere! I woke up this morning to discover that three of my favorite fellow-bloggers, who had let their pages lapse for quite a while, are back in business with new posts. Petya, Ideas Man,PhD and Professor KGrady… welcome back! You may be interested to read about a…

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Moving

I’m moving today…. again. Like most people, I hate moving. As a matter of fact, on my list of “miserable human experiences,” the ranking goes something like this:1. Moving2. Grading3. Dying (a distant third, really) I’ve got good help (read: “students”) and I’m going to do my best to be chipper today, but I got…

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Celebrity Colonialism

In a recent article for the Mail and Guardian, Brendan O’Neill suggests that adoptions of African children by the likes of Madonna and Brangelina may show us that “having a black baby is the new black.” O’Neill calls this phenomenon the “White Madonna’s Burden” (in not-so-thinly-veiled reference to the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The…

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Weak Humanism

Because I was having some technical blogging difficulties last week, I just posted briefly on the Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. In that post, I urged readers to visit the Tear It Down project website, which is the home of an initiative to tear down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and to call…

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What It Looked Like

Here it is… our tornado: I don’t know who the crazy people are who stay outside to take pictures of these monsters when they roll through town, but I guess I’m glad someone does it. It makes the following images make more sense… Those pictures above were taken by my cousin, who lives on a…

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Silver Lining

I’m going to avoid making excuses for my absence on this blog of late… mostly because my excuses are all of the things you would expect me to say and none of them are as exciting as “my house was destroyed by the tornado” or “I’m pregnant with triplets” or “God spoke to me through…

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Ain’t Too Proud…

So, I like to think of myself as a pretty autonomous and independent woman most of the time… but then, occasionally, I have to deal with the DMV. In those unfortunate instances, in the words of The Temptations, I ain’t too proud to beg. I had not changed my car tags since I moved back…

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