Tag: Black people
How Octavia Butler Told the Future
Somehow she knew this time would come. The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence—Octavia Butler foresaw them all.
Butler was not a climate scientist, a political pundit, or a Silicon Valley technologist. The author of imaginative and often disturbing speculative fiction such as Parable of the Sower (1993), she was a
Arlington’s Civil War Legacy Is Finally Laid to Rest
The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of
What Will America Be Like in 2050?
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What do you think America will be like in 2050?
Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
The coronavirus pandemic led to a dramatic increase in the number of people who work from home, followed by
Abraham Lincoln Wasn’t Too Good for Politics
Abraham Lincoln was a politician, though people like to describe him in ways that sound more noble. Contemporaries considered him a Christlike figure who suffered and died so that his nation might live. Tolstoy called him “a saint of humanity.” Lincoln himself said he was only the “accidental instrument” of a “great cause”—but he preserved the country and took part in a social revolution because he engaged in politics. He did the work that others found dirty or beneath
Richard Hanania’s ‘The Origins of Woke’ Is a Gateway Drug for Extremism
This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.”
Richard Hanania and the Allure of Racist Pseudoscience
The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also
The Books Briefing: Should We Still Read ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’?
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the trials of an enslaved man named Tom who accepts his suffering with Christian equanimity proved a boon to the abolitionist cause, though its actual depictions of Black people skimp on providing
Harriet Tubman, Outdoorswoman – The Atlantic
When I was a child, my father took me to the river—the mighty Ohio—so I could walk on water. It was January 1977, the second-coldest winter on record in Cincinnati. Twenty-eight days below zero led to a river freeze 12 inches thick. The river became a bridge between regions we have named Ohio and Kentucky, the North and the South. The Ohio froze more commonly in the 19th century than in the 20th, and the last time was more than
How race-consciousness can affect relationships
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What roles should “color-blindness” and race-consciousness play in personal interactions (as distinct from public policy)?
Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
In recent editions of this newsletter, I highlighted the TED Talk “A Case for
The Magazine That Was a Window on America
I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor.
But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for