One night, late in April 1989, I sat in an apartment in Jersey City, discussing the Central Park jogger rape case with two friends. One of them, a black Haitian-American, expressed unease over the press and television coverage of the case, the use of the language of ‘wolf packs,’ ‘savages,’ ‘wilding,’ and all of theContinue reading “The Central Park Five: Justice Gone Wrong”
Tag Archives: racism
Steven Salaita And The Anger Of the Subjugated
In response to my post yesterday, which I crossposted over at the NewAPPS blog, a couple of readers there wondered about the analogy I had drawn between Professor F and Steven Salaita‘s cases. Reader Meir Alon suggested my comparison was ‘very wrong’, Darius Jedburgh said my comparison of Salaita was, indeed, ‘slanderous’, and yet anotherContinue reading “Steven Salaita And The Anger Of the Subjugated”
Soccer’s Clubs and Countries
Once the hubbub and the desperate hopes of the group stage have died down, the World Cup slowly settles down to normal service: the upstarts fade away and the big guns play on. Now, at the semi-final stage, the match-ups look decidedly familiar: Brazil versus German, Netherlands versus Argentina. (The final could be any oneContinue reading “Soccer’s Clubs and Countries”
“Look Out of the Window, Camel Jockey”
Twenty-seven years ago, I arrived in the US, and shortly thereafter, began graduate school at a small technical school in Newark, New Jersey. Once classes picked up speed, I spent increasing amounts of time in our grim library–rather inefficiently if I may say so–struggling to stay awake while finishing my readings and programming assignments. ToContinue reading ““Look Out of the Window, Camel Jockey””
Nicholas Kristof is Gullible, Very Gullible
Nicholas Kristof thinks conservatives are–like a broken clock–right at least some of the time. Kristof, unfortunately, is just wrong throughout his latest limp Op-Ed. To borrow a line from Steven Soderbergh‘s plainspoken Limey they are right precisely the ‘square root of sweet FA‘ number of times – a vanishingly small number. What are the conservatives rightContinue reading “Nicholas Kristof is Gullible, Very Gullible”
The Mad Men Can’t Quite Get Hold Of Me
A year or so ago, I wrote my first brief response to AMC’s Mad Men. Three episodes in, I described it as ‘grim’ and a ‘serious downer’. Now, five seasons in, I’m still inclined to that description. (The fact that it has taken me this long to come close to exhausting Netflix’s online repository of itsContinue reading “The Mad Men Can’t Quite Get Hold Of Me”
The American Tragedy of Willie Bosket
The story of Willie Bosket, now serving a life sentence, due only to be released from solitary confinement in 2062, and once described as New York state’s most dangerous prison inmate, is the kind of tale all too easily described as an American tragedy. Fox Butterfield‘s All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition ofContinue reading “The American Tragedy of Willie Bosket”
Ta-Nehisi Coates Attacks One Privilege, Defends Another
Last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly took Dylan Byers to task after the latter’s snarky response to Coates’ anointment of Melissa Harris-Perry as ‘America’s foremost public intellectual’: What sets Byers apart is the idea that considering Harris-Perry an intellectual is somehow evidence of inferior thinking. I came up in a time when white intellectuals were forever makingContinue reading “Ta-Nehisi Coates Attacks One Privilege, Defends Another”
Reading Native Son
Partha Chatterjee describes his experience of first reading Edward Said‘s Orientalism: I will long remember the day I read Orientalism. It must have been in November or December of 1980. In India, this season is classically called Hemanta and assigned a slot between autumn and winter. In Calcutta, where nothing classical remains untarnished, all that thisContinue reading “Reading Native Son”
RIP Nelson Mandela
I must have been an extraordinarily ignorant teenager because the first time I heard of Nelson Mandela came only when I saw The Specials perform ‘Free Nelson Mandela‘ on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Who was Nelson Mandela, and why was it imperative that he be freed? What had this man done to getContinue reading “RIP Nelson Mandela”
Samir Chopra 