What’s the difference between code switching and dog whistling? They are the same to me. Although each comes from opposite extremes, both are grossly involved in forms of naked self-denials. Each of us has a thing, a trademark that we carry in high esteem. Self-signatures of this flavor are seen as authentic tells shaping and…
After remaining silent during a decade of oral arguments, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas drew gasps from the gallery as he started asking about constitutional provisions pertaining to the second amendment. Thomas rose back to life on Monday, February 29, 2016 and has been surprisingly talkative ever since. Upon completing his thirtieth term on the…
In October 2015, following the passage of an anti-communism law in Ukraine, a Vladimir Lenin statue turned into Star Wars’ Darth Vader overnight. De-communist measures have long been synonymous with America’s pop culture missionary work. This image was a reminder that the aggressive-style political realism practiced by the Putins of the world has been outstripped…
On January ninth, influential sociologist-philosopher Zygmunt Bauman passed away at the age of ninety-one. A central theme Bauman taught over the decades is that we should work hard to resist the tenets and dogmas of seclusion, loneliness, or independence of modern selves. Our Individual personal worth is, Bauman contended, so much more complex, interdependent, and…
Faustus had a superfluity of victuals and provisions, for when he desired a good wine the spirit brought it to him from whatever cellars he liked (the Doctor himself was once heart to remark that he wanted to make great inroads on the cellar of his Lord Elector of Saxony as well as those of…
Scientists announced on January 26th, the first successful human-animal hybrid. It is yet another confirmation that modern monstrousness has been unleashed. We are well into the epoch of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To be modern increasingly means to live within the blurred lines of the acceptable and unacceptable. Revealed in the new sapiens-pig species is that…
American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead writes in Modes of Thought: “If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken” (MT, 1938, 237). Unlike religious mystics who look to the upper regions of the “unspoken”, philosophers are tasked with going into the deep. As lovers…
Co-Author: Laura J. Mueller It has become all too normal that what the average American citizen refers to as a “national tragedy,” such as police-initiated homicides of the unarmed, or mass shootings, is treated in predictably routine, hollow fashion. The oxymoronic tension between the tragedy and its therapeutic treatment is the New American Norm. The…
The decade of the Harlem Renaissance was not only an important moment in American cultural history but, as Langston Hughes writes in his autobiography The Big Sea, it was a time in which even “the Negro was in vogue.” Hughes gives a vivid description of how precarious the social situation had become White people began…
Current events point to a future that forces whiteness into a state of chronic self-irritation. This week we have seen Muhammad Ali is being honored and memorialized no differently than a head of state. In his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, he went from not being able to enjoy the use of equal facilities or sit…