David Brooks wants to “persuade” high school football players who are kneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic racism that what they are doing is “extremely counterproductive.” He does so by identifying this country’s “civic religion,” which is “a fusion of radical hope and radical self-criticism” and “based on a moral premise–that all menContinue reading “David Brooks Should Take A Knee And Stop Writing Stupid Op-Eds”
Tag Archives: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jacob Bronowski on the Missing Shakespeare of the Bushmen
Jacob Bronowski–who so entertained and edified many of us with The Ascent of Man–was very often a wise man but he was also Eurocentric, a weakness that produced astonishingly reductive views about the ‘East’, about ‘uncivilized’ and ‘uncultured’ societies. This inclination is noticeably on display in his dialog The Abacus and the Rose,¹ in the courseContinue reading “Jacob Bronowski on the Missing Shakespeare of the Bushmen”
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”
Samir Chopra 