In the midst of Russia invading Ukraine, I planned a study travel trip to Poland focused on the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. The trip, for various reasons, didn’t materialize because we did not have enough students sign up. We started seeking students before the invasion, and we had trouble getting students interested. Part of this, I think, came from the heaviness of the … Read More Jim Crow and the Holocaust in Comics CFP
In order to understand the present and prepare for the future, we must understand the past and the ways that the past impact the present. As Frederick Douglas put it in his 1852 speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” When … Read More We Must Critically Engage With the Past or We Are Doomed to Repeat It
The myth of opportunity in America runs deep, so deep in fact you’d be forgiven if you thought it appeared as the American Dream in the founding documents. It’s an old myth, one rooted in Puritanism and the Protestant Work Ethic, transformed by Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, extrapolated by Horatio Alger in his Ragged Dick stories, epitomized by Jay Gatz in F. Scott … Read More The Myth of Opportunity in History Textbooks
Over the past month, I have read two powerfully moving graphic novels about the separation of families during war. Miriam Katin’s We Are On Our Own focuses on Miram and her mother’s escape from the Nazis in Budapest during World War II. Along with Katin’s memoir, I read Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s The Waiting, a fictional story, based on Gendry-Kim’s mother and sister being separated during the Korean War, separated … Read More Hands in Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s “The Waiting”
In The High Desert: black. punk. nowhere., James Spooner details growing up as a Black kid in Apple Valley, California, and being into punk rock. He details the liminality he felt, being seen as not Black enough by his Black classmates or as nonwhite by his white punk friends. When Spooner met Ty, a Black punk kid, at school, he fell in love with … Read More The Misappropriation of Anti-Racist Punk Classics
Interminable Rambling 