Justin Simien’s television adaptation of his movie, Dear White People, appeared on Netflix in April to considerable fanfare and controversy. The satirical series about racial struggles at the fictional Ivy League school, Winchester University, earned a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. The trailer also attracted its share of white Americans on social media miffed about… Read more →
Austin C. McCoy
Austin C. McCoy
Contributor
A Lesson in Protest: Teaching History and Citizenship in the Trump Era
This semester I am teaching a course called “Resisting State Violence: Race, Policing, and Social Justice in Twentieth-Century America.” One of the course objectives is to encourage students to investigate the histories of policing, surveillance, political repression, deportation, and incarceration, and the ways they intersect with racism, settler colonialism, xenophobia, economic exploitation, and sexism and… Read more →
The Campaign to Confront Nixon and End the War in Indochina
Now that Trump has been installed as President, many Americans are turning to history for inspiration in resisting his agenda. I suggest that a little-known group, the Indochina Peace campaign, an antiwar organization founded by Tom Hayden, actress and activist Jane Fonda, and others may offer a model and strategy. As much of the work on… Read more →
The Black Panthers’ and Tom Hayden’s Lessons to the White Left in an Age of Trump
I often receive inquiries from white and non-black folks about how they can get involved in anti-racist organizing, especially after high-profile police shootings of African Americans. The requests for advice increased after Donald Trump’s election. I usually oblige because I always want to help, and I consider answering such questions to be part of political… Read more →
“Made in America”: O.J. Simpson, Race, and the Triumph of Toxic Masculinity
Black and white America could not have been further apart than on the morning of October 3, 1995 when a jury acquitted O.J. Simpson in the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. While most white Americans responded to the jury’s “not guilty” verdict with horror, many African-Americans rejoiced. Filmmaker Ezra Edelman seeks to… Read more →
Teaching in an Era of Black Lives Matter
One of the functions of social movements is to raise consciousness around a particular problem or issue. The Black Lives Matter movement is no different. Activists have successfully used disruptive protest, policymaking, and social media to influence public debates around structural racism, state violence, policing, and mass incarceration. The movement, as well as my experiences… Read more →
Lessons from the Funky Diabetic: Phife Dawg as Reluctant Health Rap Pioneer
Often being a hip-hop fan means learning how to deal with the sudden loss of beloved artists. It always feels like they’re taken away too soon. Boogie Down Productions’s DJ, Scott LaRock, was shot and killed in 1987 at the age of 25. Eazy-E succumbed to complications of the AIDS virus in 1993. He was… Read more →
“Serving the People”: A Review of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
As singer Beyoncé and her team of black beret and leather-sporting background dancers reminded viewers during the Super Bowl halftime show, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. In October 1966, Party co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton began working on building an armed self-defense organization to… Read more →
An Interview with Historian Heather Ann Thompson (Part 2)
The second in a two-part interview with historian Heather Ann Thompson, whose seminal article on mass incarceration, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History” appeared in the December issue of the Journal of American History. In this interview, Thompson talks with Austin McCoy about her scholarly trajectory, the impact… Read more →
An Interview with Historian Heather Ann Thompson (Part 1)
2010 was an important year for scholarship documenting the history of the carceral state. In January, legal scholar Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America arrived the next month. Heather Ann… Read more →