Over the past month, I’ve read Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), his posthumously published Romance in Marseille (2020), and his memoir A Long Way from Home (1937). Numerous thematic threads run throughout these texts; however, as I read A Long Way from Home, one specific theme jumped out at me, specifically McKay’s discussion, at various points in his memoir, about the ways that racism and … Read More The System Changes but the Prejudice Remains
Growing up, I’d be riding with someone and as we drove through a parking lot, the person may look at a Cadillac or a car that was not parked correctly and say, “Gotta be a Democrat.” Or, while waiting in line somewhere, a person might say, “Look at that Canadian acting like that.” In each of these cases, the speaker attempted to code their … Read More The Importance of Critically Engaging with Language
As World War II progressed, concentration camps such as Dachau, which opened in March 1933 and could accommodate 5,000 people, ballooned in size and no one could escape the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. By the end of the war, when the Americans liberated Dachau in 1945, Konnilyn Feig points out the camp held 30,000 prisoners, six times what it could accommodate, and “8,000 unburied corpses.” … Read More Who do you want to be?
In “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” Umberto Eco lists out features of fascism and points out that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around us.” Traditionalism, the longing for a mythological past, looms larges as one of the defining features of fascism. This gazing backwards, immediately raises a wall to learning and … Read More Florida, Fascism, and the Past
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching John A. Williams’ Clifford’s Blues and exploring the intricate interconnections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. In a recent post, I wrote some about the Black Horror on the Rhine and Clifford’s Blues. Today, I want to continue some of that discussion, specifically by looking at Clifford’s June 27, 1938, diary entry which covers a few different events and topics … Read More The Revelation of the Past in John A. Williams’ “Clifford’s Blues”
