Read a few links to celebrate Arizona’s statehood, Frederick Douglass’ birthday, or the latest Hallmark holiday:
- The Women Suffering for Your Valentine’s Day Flowers.
- The End of Baghdad’s Twelve-Year-Old Night-Curfew.
- White Happened to You.
- I TURNED CAPS LOCK ON FOR A WEEK AND EVERYBODY HATED IT.
- Here’s N+1’s symposium on labor and magazines.
- Zoo Security Drills: When Animals Escape (with animal costumes).
- African Artists Subvert Colonial Imagery.
- Selling the Sacred Cow: India’s Beef Industry.
- Time’s Resistless Stream.
Not only do we bend the natural world to mathematics and science, then, but we also bend mathematics and science to political ends as well. No calendar is innocent, no temporal system is neutral…
Nationalist attempts to remake the date aren’t new — in perhaps the most famous example, the French Republican Calendar not only reorganized the days and months around a ten-day week called a décade, but also restarted the entire thing at Year I. At the time John Quincy Adams decried it as “superficially frivolous” and “coarsely vulgar,” not to mention “irreligious” — but this was of course the point: the de-Christianization of the calendar, and a temporal arrangement of time with an entirely new set of symbolic compass points. A calendar that was no longer based on saints’ feasts and religious holidays towards one named after the progression of the seasons and the plants and vegetables of nature, where September 22 (the date of the founding of the French Republic), not January 1, was now the beginning of the year, and the year itself was no longer 1792.
- Guilty, Then Proven Innocent, on North Carolina’s Innocent Inquiry Commission.
- A Radical Standard of Pain.
- Arizona State University is the “New American University” and its Terrifying.
- Zionism and the New McCarthyism.
- Sex after Sexual Assault, Life after Rape.
- University of California BDS Campaign Diverges from Elite Schools’.
- The Death of the Three-Time Candidate.
- The Conspicuous Absence of Solidarity.
Twitter’s trending hashtags suggests that Americans can bring themselves to talk about the #ChapelHIllShooting but they can’t utter their names. They can’t be these people. While it is clear that we don’t need another parade of hoodie-clad white people claiming #IamTrayvon it is striking that there isn’t even an attempt to do so. White America can immediately identify with a racist French satire magazine they’ve never heard of, but can’t possibly stand in solidarity with fellow Americans that also happen to be Muslim.
The straight-forward narrative that makes #JeSuisCharlie so legible to so many people is inaccessible to the marginal. The causes of violence perpetrated by white men is exploded by white supremacist patriarchy’s insistence that each instance of white terror is actually the confluence of psychological illness, the availability of guns, video games, or anything else that doesn’t threaten the racial order or patriarchy head-on.
When uprisings occur, when people that are systematically denied the preconditions of solidarity ––the ability to continually meet each-other unharassed, a common language, the material support to mobilize against one’s oppressors–– find them through perseverance and creativity, the invisible background radiation that maintains their oppression suddenly becomes opaque and solid. The sustained and largely invisible strategies of hegemony are temporarily traded in for the tactics of swift and immediate police violence. To those not paying attention it might seem to come out of nowhere, but for everyone else it is utterly predictable.
- The Most Common Type of American Terrorist is a White Man with a Weapon and a Grudge.
- When Girls of Color are Policed Out of School.
- On Reverse Engineering, an anthropological look at algorithms.
- Real Africa Emerging.
- Everyday Life: A Feminist Analysis.
- How To Improve Police-Community Relations? Hold Bad Cops Accountable.
- The Condemnation of Memory: What’s Behind the Destruction of UNESCO World Heritage Sites?