No Flags, No Slogans
Who are they? And why do they never speak for themselves?
Regular people. Normal people. Ordinary people. Average people. Everyday people. (No, not the song whose chorus is likely stuck in your head right now.)
The masses. Salt of the earth. The working class.
Continue reading “Regular People”A personal reckoning with the dialectic between pain and pleasure.
Without looking it up, I know exactly when lockdown got serious: Friday, March 13. The entire day felt off. I remember parking my bus in the evening—the lot was uncharacteristically quiet—and thinking, “Yeah, I won’t be doing this again for a while.”
Later that evening, the county I work for closed down all the schools. The closure would last until the end of the term. My child’s school, in Maryland, would shutter the following Monday.
Continue reading “A Dispatch from Month Four of Quarantine”Let’s figure out what we’re talking about first.
Note: This essay is the third part of a three-part series on social media. Click here for part one and here for part two.
Many champions of free speech are less into civil liberties than the preservation of a certain view of modernity. “Free speech,” in its discursive form (the form it takes as a rhetorical ideal), can be a mechanism to discipline people who have long been voiceless. Beyond its legal dynamics, the term often reifies capitalist principles of free-marketeering and accumulation. It also enables social media luminaries to deflect criticism when they share ghoulish opinions. Above all, the discourse of free speech preserves a vision of Americana implicated in an unacknowledged colonial origin. Harmful politics, logic has it, are a necessary feature of democracy.
Continue reading “Should We Cancel Cancel Culture?”Annexation is bad news, but we should understand it as a material expression of Zionism.
Annexation of the West Bank isn’t a new idea. Zionists always had their eye on what they call Judea and Samaria, the actual sites of biblical significance as opposed to the coastal and desert areas they conquered in 1948. As soon as Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, its leaders began discussing annexation.
In fact, Netanyahu’s effort isn’t much different from Yigal Allon’s 1967 proposal (the so-called Allon Plan). It’s still not clear exactly how the Israeli government will proceed—apparently it intends to annex Area C, including the Jordan Valley, although some officials reportedly want to claim the entire West Bank—but the idea is to make a viable Palestinian state impossible, in keeping with Allon’s vision.
Continue reading “Does It Matter If Israel Annexes the West Bank?”In a media culture that rewards provocation, it’s easy to confuse gimmickry with principle.
Some months back, I got a letter from the Virginia Department of Taxation. I’d been receiving letters from the Department for a while. Normally I put them in a pile on the kitchen counter and went on my way. I don’t know what compelled me to open this particular letter, but I immediately regretted it. Inside was a bill for back taxes in excess of $72,000.
Continue reading “Repression Is Not A Brand”Zionist defamation can be scary, but it needn’t immobilize your commitment to justice.
University students and instructors periodically drop into my inbox with stories of repression and reprisal for having criticized Israel—or merely for having spoken favorably of Palestinians. In some cases, faculty have been demoted or fired, or have been denied tenure. In other cases, they’ve lost funding or opportunities to publish. They’ve been threatened, if only implicitly (plenty of times the threat is explicit). Students have been profiled by websites aiming to destroy their careers (pro-Israel zealots are expert snitches) or subject to some kind of disciplinary action.
Continue reading “To Students and Teachers Targeted by the Israel Lobby”Now that the Sanders campaign has ended, Palestinian Americans should reflect on why our organizations so readily abandoned anti-imperialism.
Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary. Now, I’m no operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or electability. It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make it visible.
Continue reading “A Postmortem on Bernie Sanders and Palestine”A child finds love amid pandemic.
A few weeks ago, my son’s eighth birthday passed and he didn’t get to have a party. He spent the day watching TV and eating junk food. Although he seemed content, his mother and I were crushed. Like most seven-and-a-half-year-olds, he had spoken excitedly about the kind of party he wanted. None of his ideas involved social distancing.
Continue reading “An Unadulterated Sense of Wonder”Perseverance is a radical’s most important quality.
Last year I was exchanging messages with Tommy J. Curry, who had recently arrived in Scotland to begin a position at the University of Edinburgh. Curry was a philosophy professor at Texas A&M in 2017 when The American Conservative ran a hit-piece accusing him of “racist bilge” and claiming that Curry is the Black inverse of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer (but even worse).
A storm of racism and defamation predictably followed. Curry became the latest Black scholar to be dehumanized in a public mobbing, a periodic ritual of white supremacy. The intensity of the vitriol was such that Curry, fearing for his family’s safety, left the United States. Leaving the country was also a professional decision. Now marked as “controversial,” a concept larded with racist undertones, he was no longer viable in the academic job market.
Continue reading “Dressing Down, Layering Up”A few things they won’t tell you during orientation.
An industry exists for providing advice to would-be professors. Unfortunately, that industry is generally worthless, filled with self-serving platitudes urging conformity to a system that will gradually kill your soul. The following advice is intended for young scholars who aspire to maintain a sense of humanity in environments of bald careerism and brutal competition. There’s no foolproof method, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. I hope the following observations help:
Continue reading “Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students”
