Sublime

The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.

Moynihan Report,

El profesor Kwame Anthony Appiah ha fechado la génesis de la idea de la raza en tiempos muy recientes, entre los siglos XVIII y XIX, cuando aparecen las escuelas de mitos médicos que servirán al imperialismo como coartada. La raza, explica Appiah, es una quimera teórica relacionada con el temor a la descomposición del cuerpo humano y social que pre

Oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. The negro of the United States has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without a

when the United States one-upped the Soviet Union in the moon landing, from farther south, on Florida’s Space Coast, it wasn’t a victory in everyone’s eyes. The event was protested by an Alabaman civil rights leader. Ralph Abernathy arrived outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center with five hundred people a few days before the launch. They bro

Certain images underscore an unbridgeable gap and a never-to-be-toppled hierarchy. When a group of people is judged to be “foreign,” it becomes far more likely that news organizations will run, for the consumption of their audiences, explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, th

This sort of discrimination and even dehumanization was already widespread, but, in Europe and its colonies, a few key differences lead to a unique analysis. Firstly, the concept of race was not consistently connected to heritability in Europe until the sixteenth century. Before then, it was generally assumed that traits like skin color were determ

a belief