Essays

The murder of George Floyd was a major catalyst event for the Black Lives Matter movement, motivating large numbers of Americans to take to the streets to spotlight structural racism in American policing. Subsequent polling found that as many as 10 percent of Americans reported attending protests for racial justice in the summer of 2020,…

Hegemonic Algorithms An algorithm can be as simple as a brownie or kombucha recipe. As a list of instructions it permits the completion of a task. Yet, what if the task—social justice—requires rewriting the algorithms we have inherited in our struggles against US racism?   In its June 19, 2020, “CALLING ON FACEBOOK CORPORATE ADVERTISERS TO PAUSE…

Part I—The Historical Background The first half of the 20th century was a catastrophe for most of the human race. Within the span of 50 years the world experienced World War I (1914 to 1918) and the death of roughly 20 million people. Then came the Great Depression (1929 to 1939) which all but destroyed…

—  Every ending must be followed by the new beginning….(This) cultural ice-age….inevitably produced new definitions….(and) a kind of interiorization that a period of outward expansion had largely ignored….When would the new beginning appear? Where…?                            — Van Wyck Brooks — What we are living through and experiencing now is not the failure of change…

The following is a riposte to an editorial published in the New York Times by Ruth Franklin which can be read here. Prosecuting Judge, Ruth Franklin Opening Statement This court has had a busy season, and the next few weeks promise to be even busier. Last week we dealt with the case of the biographer…

Epidemics expose a great deal about who we are. They always have. Old orders die.  New ideas take shape. “There is something deep here connected to what is the real truth about who we really are, not what we are told about ourselves,” says social movement scholar Marina Sitrin. “Yes, we are afraid. Yes, we…

The human species has reached a critical tipping point which poses an existential choice. If the species is not to be a victim of its own technological success and destroy itself in nuclear war or due to the effects of climate change, it is faced with the collective task of accomplishing a qualitative leap in…

Stockholm syndrome is the term for desperate captives who, in extreme cases, begin to or really do identify with the culprits endangering them. Call it perversity squared but the syndrome is understandable in extended survival quests. One cannot imagine a better explanation as to why many movement veterans lavished grateful praise on the insidious Yuppified…