Originally published by Tropics of Meta on April 21, 2016. For a generation of youth — queer and non-queer alike — Prince cleared the path to a different way of embodying gender and sexuality. I recited the intro to “Let’s Go Crazy” at my wedding reception in 2006, to a room of largely puzzled fifty-… Read more →
Tag: Race
“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 →
The Other Side of Choice, a Review of Independent Lens “No Más Bebés“
Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with contemporary American culture likely understands that female fertility has been a hotly contested, and highly politicized, issue for over forty years. Typically, these discussions revolve around abortion. There is, however, another side to reproductive choice: the right to reproduce. It is this often overlooked aspect of “a woman’s… 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 →
Suffragette, T-Shirtgate, and a Taylor Swift Tweet: Breaking Down the Historical Problem of White Lady Feminism
Can rich, white ladies be effective feminists? In the court of public opinion these days, it seems the answer is no, mostly because they keep saying and doing really stupid things. Women of color and those of us lacking in the silver spoon department have been telling everyone from Taylor Swift to Erica Jong to… Read more →
Jessie Mitchell’s Mother
Unless we’re toiling away in an English PhD program, most of us don’t pause in our daily lives to read poetry– to read anything closely, really. We might scrutinize a job offer or rental contract, or devour a Facebook feed. Seldom, however, do we allow ourselves to pause over a verse, to wade into a… Read more →
Surviving While Black in America: A Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
One of the products of Americans’ growing consciousness around racism and the police killings of African Americans is the conversation about the “talk” that African American parents conduct with their sons and daughters. I do not recall my mother and father engaging me in a specific conversation, but rather a series of conversations about navigating… Read more →
Teaching Sexuality, Gender, and Race in Middle School
“So what do you do?” We all have asked this familiar question while making small talk at a BBQ, a bar, or a kid’s sporting event. I smile whenever I get this question – already knowing how the person will respond to my answer. “I teach 8th grade.” Cue the familiar, “Oh wow.” “But they’re… Read more →
Police Brutality, Mental Illness, and Race in the Age of Mass Incarceration
On November 9, 2014, two Ann Arbor police officers shot and killed Aura Rosser, a 40-year-old black woman, after responding to a domestic violence call. In the 911 call, Rosser’s partner, 54-year-old Victor Stephens, claimed Rosser had attacked him with a kitchen knife. According to the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s report, Officers Mark Raab and David… Read more →