Race and Racism

Kids Today

Exactly one year ago this month, I attended and photographed my first #BlackLivesMatter event and this image (left) has not left my mind since. This is a photograph of a student at my University. Christian Brothers University, who on that day (December 9, 2014) participated in an event called #WalkOutToChalkOut.  Students that day on our campus walked…

Read More

Sixth Amendment, Unfunded

This is just a short post motivated by my #BlackLivesMatter Reading Group session yesterday, where we discussed Albert Samaha‘s excellent essay “Indefensible: The Story of New Orleans’ Public Defenders.”  I thought I was long past being shocked by anything

Read More

Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

Read More

Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

Read More

The Academy Doesn’t Need a Civility Code. It Needs a Hostility Code.

Fair warning: what follows will assume the arguments I’ve already made against the advisability of “civility/collegiality” codes in academia here and here. Read those first.  Second fair warning:  there’s a lot to read herein before you get to my advocacy of a “hostility code.” Be patient, grasshoppers. My general blogging habit inclines me toward what…

Read More

Three Non-Softball Questions for Charles Mills: Marxism, Racial Liberalism and Being “Lost in Rawlsland”

I want to state for the record, right here at the start, that there is quite simply no other LIVING philosopher who has been more influential on my own work or thinking than Charles Mills.  (I emphasize “living” as a perfunctory caveat, only because both Derrida and Rawls died during my lifetime as a professional Philosopher.)  Over the last decade, I’ve…

Read More

Hotel Bar Sessions, Ep 31: Whose History?

  The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. to talk about whose history is (and isn’t) being taught. Following on the heels of a recent and very contentious political debate over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, we invited Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. (Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor…

Read More

Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 24: Specialization

  The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive. Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, theh “add diversity and stir” model…

Read More

Hotel Bar Sessions Ep17: Citizenship

  This episode explores the political and ethical dimensions of the category of the “citizen.” In anticipation of his soon-to-be-released book Beyond Civil Disobedience: Social Nullification and Black Citizenship (August 2021!), Charles Peterson takes the “captain’s seat” for this episode’s discussion of the limits of citizenship, the failure of the state, and the construction of new…

Read More