White Evangelicals and Critical Race Theory
On August 18, 1963, 10 days before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an article entitled “Our Laws Must Be Upheld” appeared in The Shreveport Times. The author derided the “Negro rights” revolution, writing that there has been “increasing public revulsion against the avalanche of propaganda that it is all right for Negroes and their white supporters to break laws in bloody street demonstrations because the so-called ‘rights’ they seek are something they are ‘supposed’ to have.” Part of this “avalanche of propaganda,” according to…
This September marks the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001. As well, it marks the start of the War on Terror and the start, in January 2002, of the detention of non-combatants such as Mansoor Adayfi at Guantánamo Bay. Adayfi spent fourteen years in Guantánamo. At the age of eighteen, during a cultural mission to Afghanistan, warlords picked him up, in order to claim a reward for enemy combatants from the United States, and turned him over to the US government. From there, he was sent to a black site before getting sent to Guantánamo. In Don’t Forget Us Here…
Jonte’ Taylor wrote “Darkness Fall, USA” years ago, and it recently appeared in the Down Yonder ‘Zine. During the Zoom event where Taylor read and spoke about the piece, he noted its continued relevance, especially within the past year. He talked about changing some lines here and there to bring it to 2021, and one of the lines that he changed struck me because it is something I constantly think and write about on this blog. Taylor writes, “We keep going to their regions with our pistols and rockets, yet we do nothing about our white national Bin Ladens.” What…
Speaking with Clint Smith, Dr. Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation, talks about the importance of education and of sites such as the Whitney. Seck told Smith, “The problem with [this] country — and also all around the world — -is . . . miseducation. The miseducation of the mind and hidden history.” The role of education in the dissemination of information and in the fostering of democracy is important. The calls for “patriotic education” are nothing new, and what these calls do is obfuscate the “hidden history” that counters the myths of American exceptionalism. This…
A few months back, I looked at two songs on Karpe’s Heisann Montebello. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at «Hvite menn som pusher 50» (“White men pushing 50”). This is the second song on the album, following «Au pair», a song that sets up the ways that the album will interrogate whiteness, white privilege, and wealth. This interrogation runs throughout the song, but two lines in particular encapsulate this thread: «Du kaller det mamma, vi kaller det samma for» (“You call it mamma, we call it the same”) and «Mammaen til Pernille er fra Manila» (“Pernille’s…
Over the past few weeks, the Crusading in Color crew has been live Tweeting our readings through Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth: Red, White, and Black. I’ve read Truth multiple times, and I’ve taught it once. Each time I reread this series, something new arises. This time, with the discussions that we had online about the series, new things started to stand out. Specifically, we talked about the symbolic nature of Captain America throughout Truth, and this discussion opened up countless other avenues to explore. Today, I want to briefly look at how we read Captain America in this…
Nostalgia powerfully pulls at us, especially as we get older. Deriving from the Greek words nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain), nostalgia relates to a longing for the familiar that has passed away. However, the authenticity of that past is not reality. It exists as a mental construction, one that plays up the feelings of youth and innocence while hiding the realities of the past. This is what Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal: The Last of the Innocent (2015) addresses. It plays with and satirizes readers’ nostalgic desires.
Set in Brookview, The Last of the Innocent draws upon comics such…
Over the last couple of posts, I’ve been looking at Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. Today, I want to conclude this series by looking at some of the panels in the last chapter of Wake. …
Last post, I wrote about the ways that Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts uses the juxtaposition of text and image to highlight the continued ways that past impacts the present. Today, I want to continue that discussion and expand it some by focusing specifically on some of Martínez’s layouts. From the opening of Wake to its conclusion, the ways that Martínez’s illustrations and layouts compliment Hall’s narrative stand out, and I cannot think, off the top of my head, another text where this occurs so well. I have been reading Jeff Lemire’s…
On a recent trip to Savannah, GA, I walked around the downtown area and visited sites such as Wormsloe, a plantation established by Noble Jones in 1736. At Wormsloe, which is a Georgia State Park, none of the materials, from the brochures to the museum to the markers around the site mentioned the enslaved who made money for Noble and his offspring. In the history of Wormsloe, the informational material says that “Noble planted” the crops that would become the monetary staples of the plantation and that he built the site. What this material erases is the labor of the…
Matthew Teutsch
Here, you will find reflections on African American, American, and Southern Literature, American popular culture and politics, and pedagogy.
