Category: race
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Birds of America
There are many layers to racialized seeing. Some racism lies beneath familiar categories, like popular culture or advertising for decades, only to suddenly (re)activate. Natural history is always there, with its concept of a hierarchy of the human. And, yes, even birds.Audubon’s birds metonymically represent settler colonialism, the Second Amendment, white supremacy, and the invisibility…
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Etihad Man
What does white nationalism look like today? It looks like Etihad Man. A 41 year old ex-soldier in Northern Ireland turned civil engineering manager, whose idea of entertainment is physical and verbal racialized violence at the Etihad football (soccer) stadium in Manchester. He embodies how Thatcherism’s Great Moving Right Show turned into Brexit. On Saturday,…
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For Anti-Racism: Against NYC’s Monuments Commission
The NYC Monument Commission was a failure. It delivered a hot mess of recommendations for more: more bureaucracy, more signs and “>more monuments. This is called an “additive” policy. Without a commitment to anti-racism and decolonial practice, none of it makes sense. The missed opportunity is that a good faith anti-racist, decolonial project could show people of…
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Monumental Questions
Today hearings were held in Manhattan for the Mayor’s Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. It was a real New York occasion, with dashes of radical politics, establishment equivocation, blunt force and moments of pure eccentricity. Anyone who wanted could speak for three minutes in randomly assigned slots. Despite being called for the day…
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Monuments, Looking, Lynching and Gender
In the past week, the ubiquitous Confederate monuments have suddenly become visible (to non-Confederate sympathizing white people) as monuments to genocide and white supremacy. It’s important to continue to show their systemic role in making and sustaining white supremacy. In particular, the monuments form a network that connects seeing, unseeing, lynching and gender in ways…
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All The Monuments Must Fall #Charlottesville
In the aftermath of the white supremacist terrorism at Charlottesville, all the monuments must fall. The murder of Heather Heyer was prompted by the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. These statues are material nodes in the network of white supremacy. They are the visible form of the established order of racial…
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For The Abolition Image #GrenfellTower #PhilandoCastile
Here we go again. A killer cop acquitted. Migrants and people of color in London dead in a completely preventable inferno. And still they come–cops kill a Black woman with mental health issues in Seattle. A “white” English man drives his van into a crowd of Ramadan worshippers. The images are terrible. Again, we must…
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Salt and Baseline Communism #dignitystrike
Salt has often been a catalyst by which the interaction of life, colonialism and apartheid can be made visible and subject to change. From India to South Africa and today’s ongoing Palestinian hunger strike, salt is the means by which the inhuman form of colonial oppression can be tasted. To deny access to salt by…
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Mutant Capital: Time for {R}evolution
Ever wonder where all the scary, white clowns went? They’re in power, of course. Because racial capitalism and petrocracy, the rule of fossil fuel, have been in a deep embrace since neoliberalism began. And children of the multiplex that we are, we know what happens when you are smothered in toxic materials like crude oil.…