Herd Immunity Against Climate Change
Whatever technologies, models, and organizational structures we develop, to orient ourselves toward social and economic justice, we must also make space for the unwilling and the unable to be independent, self-determined, and safe. This means insulating them against the violent death throes of our system of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism, as we replace it with something better. Many things better. Institutions and new relationships at the local, regional, national, and global levels that cultivate enough trust and build enough capacity for everyone to participate equitably.
Education for Sustainability
The moment demands a mass mobilization of people and collective will. Which means bridging gaps: in knowledge, resources, understanding, and empathy. In our conversations, and in our work around sustainability, we have to integrate those things which support and affirm our rights to healthy, dignified lives, so we even have the capacity to take on something so grandiose as “saving the planet”.
Free Speech, Cancel Culture, and the Miseducation of Cousin Miles
Those who benefit from the status quo (and those who aspire to) — by virtue of social, economic, or political power and privilege — would really quite like it, if the rest of you wouldn’t much mind, if we could just keep things “civil”. A premium is placed on preserving the appearance, not just of civility, but of the fundamental “goodness” of those in power.
Who Should Have a Seat at the Education Policy Table?
That whole time, there were other voices, on the margins of academia and the political sphere – pushed there by the relentless power of the status quo and those who uphold it – who were already making the case Nick and Diane only just came to understand. There were teachers who understood it, even if they didn’t have the vocabulary or the platform to make the case, or of they did, were quickly buried by the neoliberal demands of the system and punished for noncompliance.
To All The Never Books
So I find myself thinking about all the “Never Books”, the books I will never write, not because of stagnation, but because for any given project I have to draw the line somewhere and finish it. There are infinite variations of any book I might write, given enough time to ruminate and to appropriate any and everything that captures my attention, stirs my devotion, or inspires my revolt. Truly, what would UTMC become if I gave it another twenty years?
The Sacrifice of Ralph Northam on the Altar of Democratic Sanctimony
This whole Virginia drama is revealing something important about the current Democratic establishment, something which has implications for both past and future, including the election of Donald Trump. That something is that Democrats are symbolic politicians, concerned more with the image of doing the right thing, than actually doing it. Where they effect policies that actually make a positive difference in people’s lives, it is usually reactive, a case of them “holding the line” against the worst abuses of the Republicans.
Black Privilege
There has undoubtedly been one person, or ten, or even one thousand black people who have gone through their lives with little to no observable experience with racism, don’t consciously feel its impact, and for that manage to gain some degree of success or wealth or high quality of life. Their experiences do not invalidate the very real existence of systems that make such outcomes more unlikely for the rest of us. Systems that privilege white people at the expense of people of color.
The God That Google Made
I thought about the implications of this AI Overseer guiding thoughts, emotions, opinions, consumer habits, politics, public policy, among many other things, including the very modes of human interaction and our reasons for doing anything at all. It sounded like a “benevolent” dictator, but one with far more insight into and power over people on an individual and collective level than any human or their administration could ever manage.
It sounded like a god.
David Cage’s Long History of Racism
The recent accusations against Quantic Dream founder David Cage do not exist in a vacuum, nor without precedent. He wants to be judged by his work, and indeed if one looks critically at his games, a theme emerges. People of color are reduced to caricatures, invoke harmful stereotypes, and should remain at the margins, if they appear at all. Even if that means literally erasing them from settings where they predominate. This is not the cross-burning of the past or the anger-marching racism so en vogue these days, but the more deeply entrenched racism underlying all of our media institutions.
10 Tips on How to Include Black People
Diverse representations of black people in media has nothing to do with “political correctness”. It has little to do with fairness, either. This is not a zero-sum game by which black gain equals white loss. What it concerns, most significantly, is the acceptance of this proposal that Black Lives Matter. That Black People Matter. Black representations are a matter of survival. Of casting us as fully-realized human beings with thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, complexity, agency — against a backdrop that explicitly shows and tells us (everyone) that the opposite is true.
The Return of Fear Effect and Fears About Its Effect
Fear Effect is coming back. Have you heard? After the heartbreak of Inferno’s cancellation, and a 15 year wait with no new game in sight, French indie studio Sushee Games is creating Fear Effect: Sedna. Concerned about representations of Inuit peoples in the game, I decided to contact Sushee Games about how they would handle the use of Inuit aesthetic, cultural stories and history.
Bill Cosby is an Actual Monster
The truth of the matter is that these revelations haven’t tarnished the image of Cliff Huxtable, and changed him into a monster. Rather, the image of Cliff Huxtable was built around an actual monster. A monster playing his best role yet, as a beloved family icon and upstanding public figure.
The Comic Subtleties of Anti-Blackness
Sometimes it’s tucked away, hidden just beneath the tongue, or in the sly twist of the mouth…
Anti-blackness is so pervasive that I think media creators aren’t even aware of how they present it on a regular basis. That’s me giving them the benefit of the doubt, in spite of all the evidence that suggests it’s intentional.
Black Mandarin
A contemplation of the revolutionary potential of teaching black kids Mandarin. Beyond allowing black people to have more mobility within a new power structure, fluency in Mandarin would allow us to spread our own influence. Our revolutionary spirit writ large to resonate with people around the world…
Thomas Jefferson: Father of White Supremacy
When you hear the name Thomas Jefferson, it is likely followed by “founding father”, “hero”, “patriot”, and other such reverent terms. But he should also be considered one of the Founding Fathers of white supremacy. Nearly every white supremacist idea, claim, or rationale, can be found in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia…
12 Years A Slave: For Whites Only
What does any black person stand to gain from sitting in a dark movie theater—more than likely surrounded by white people—and being psychologically assaulted for two hours? Will we then turn to those white audience members and discuss how horrible it all was, how many tears they shed, and eventually breathe a collective sigh of relief that all that was in the past, and thank God that we’ve come so far?
Flexuality: The Elasticity of Sexual Norms in the Works of Octavia E. Butler
An examination of how Butler challenges sexual norms, from the incest taboo in the Patternist series, to interspecies sex in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, to pedophilia and rape in Fledgling, and arguably all three of these in her short story Bloodchild. These stories show us how norms, particularly sexual ones, are flexible between worlds, cultures, and especially individuals.
The Case for a “Mexican Superman”
The obvious reason for more diversity and inclusion in comics is to allow marginalized people to better identify with the characters. For white fans, whether they are willing to accept it or not, the white default actually makes characters less interesting. A bold claim, I know, but bear with me. Superheroes, I think, are more interesting for being more human, for having trauma, hardship, and conflict. To the great extent that white folks – particularly cisgendered heterosexual men – have privilege and power, it further insulates them against the kinds of scenarios that give birth to heroes.
The Failures of the Legend of Korra
Taken as a whole, the first season of The Legend of Korra failed, because of what the creators seemed to be setting in motion – call it a promise of great things to come, even – and how they did not deliver on that promise by the season finale…
Those who cannot remember the past…
…are condemned to repeat it:
The following passage is from The Principle of the Mercantile System, written in 1776 by Adam Smith, who ironically, has become a sort of symbol of the same type of “free market” capitalists who Smith seems to be criticizing here. More striking than any of that, though, is how much this passage so precisely reflects our current situation.
Rhetorical Inclusiveness
I take issue with the very idea that it need be some sort of marketing or political strategy, some sort of acquiescence to irrational demands that someone represent or treat people of color with sensitivity and respect. Yet in the case of Tithe, I am left wondering if that was not exactly the point.
The High Concept of Fate
Who Fears Death, for its fatalistic structure, could have easily fallen into the trap of giving the overall plot precedence over the characters. Yet, on the contrary, the vast majority of the book was spent developing the characters as they traveled – no, were pulled along – towards their fate…
The Villain’s Niche
While we exalt or vilify real life figures, we know deep down that people are more complex than what their words or actions tell us, or what great good or great evil we might wish to project upon them. By contrast, heroes and villains also make things easy on us: they are easy to love and support, or easy to hate and blame for all that is wrong with the world…
A Note of Discord
Follow the Waves, written by Amal El-Mohtar, is a story filled with gorgeous, rhythmic language, of the sort to be expected from someone who is a poet first. It seems that nearly every paragraph is layered with multiple meanings, and contain phrases that we could even call verses…
Reality Shift
We take it for granted that our perception of reality is grounded in some objective truth. We do not even consider the possibility that there is no such thing, that instead “reality” is composed of a multitude of overlapping spheres of perception, the shared spaces together making up those aspects of reality that we agree upon – the collective consciousness, to give it another name…
The Misrepresentation of the Magical Negro
It is one of the oldest clichés that the “forces of darkness” will set upon that which is good and “light”. In a medium where the heroes are most often white and characters of color – especially black characters – are reduced to plot devices, and in a society where power is designated along lines of “light” and “dark”, the old trope is necessarily racialized…
The Battle for Brain Space
An analysis of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods — As the battle for “brain space” rages on, with each new scientific innovation, new interpretations of history, shifts in culture and society, we must reconcile these changes with the deep-seated desire in all of us to hold on to some part of our pasts…
Shapeshifting and the Locus of Self
The concept of self as a collection of interchangeable parts is consistent with our existential freedom to “reinvent” ourselves, once we recognize that we have the ability to do so. We can change how we interface with others, our outward appearance, our language, our gender, even to a point our “race” – at least with respect to our own internal concept of self, apart, if not completely removed from the perceptions of others…
Coyote Kings and the Cost of Civilization
Heinz Meaney’s implication is that our final advancement as human beings will be predicated upon the annihilation of the world itself. Faust seems to be suggesting we look at our “highly advanced” civilization for what it is – violent, invasive, and ultimately destructive….
Multi-Purpose Exposition
We view the sunset through a different lens – one of morose, even pessimistic contemplation. The sun is not merely setting to rise another day, it is dying. The clouds are torn, suggesting that their condition is not natural, but has been inflicted upon them…
Exclusion and Fetishism
For all “darkness” figures into the thinking of fantasy authors, it is conspicuously absent from the features of the characters. Except the “dark lords” and such, who play off of the fact that darkness equates to evil in the white literary imagination. Tolkien took it a step further, equating not only darkness with evil in the abstract, but designing his evil characters – goblins, trolls, and the like – with Africanesque features…
Contemplating Cultural Appropriation
In Until the Monsters Come, I borrow from first-hand accounts of the Stolen Generations of Indigenous Australians. As I’ve continued writing, however, I’ve gotten to thinking about cultural appropriation…
Identifying the Indian Killer
Alexie points a finger at the self-satisfying ramblings of white liberals, who for all they may understand intellectually, lack any real personal understanding of the Indian condition, or of the fact that there may not even be any such monolithic condition…
Beauty and Self-Hatred in Flight
In Flight, Alexie seems to be asking whether or not self-hatred can be neutralized through assimilation – that is, can Zits’s hatred of his own Indian-ness be dissolved into a claiming of his whiteness? Indeed whiteness itself is a product of assimilation, with Irish, Italian, German, and other European ethnicities blending within the “melting pot” to create a new racial paradigm.
Evoking the Senses
Within the context of the novel, these details, which might be applied to say, a cooking accident in another book, convey so much more than just how the characters physically experience the world. They express all the tension and urgency of high stakes conflict and even combat, all without mentioning any of those things explicitly.
Video Games Can Never Be Art
I have argued in the past that video games are the ultimate form of expression, and what is art if not expression? Indeed video games are a convergence of art from just about every medium – audio, visual, literary – and their social impact is ever-increasing. Ebert makes his statement by observing video footage of a few games offered up as art, already prepared to deny the possibility. Aside from the sheer fallacy of denying art as a form of expression, there is also the matter of his evaluation not being made from the proper standpoint.
Uncharted 2 and the Burden of Awareness
Once upon a time, I was able to just play video games and enjoy them. I didn’t see race, I didn’t see cultural issues, or gender issues, or anything. Games, after all, were my escape from such heady things. But now I can’t help but notice them. There is hardly a movie or a game or a book where I’m not looking for and easily spotting a slew of cultural insensitivities and outright offenses that can only be attributed to the obliviousness or indifference of white game developers.
Black, White, and Jade: Race in Video Games
As technology improves, and as the content of games expands in terms of breadth and depth, opportunities only increase for representing diversity. In the future, it will not be enough for a character to have darker skin, thicker lips, or a different eye shape. We will have to see different cultures and experiences represented as well.
Ethnic Depictions in Video Games
Those of us who are not white, but hope to identify with the characters we play in games the same as anyone, find the industry to be deficient. At best we have had to settle for ethnically ambiguous characters, often in non-Earth settings, which while fulfilling an aesthetic need still leave players wanting for a more substantial connection. When characters of non-European ethnicities are depicted in video games, it is true that they are often stereotypes.
Islam and Global Conflict
Even in accepting the apologists’ arguments, that Islam was essentially a peaceful religion, and it was only through a myopic and agenda-driven misinterpretation of the holy texts that the “Islamist” perspective emerged, there was still a problem. It seemed to me that all around the world, where there were “insurgencies” or other forms of violent conflict, at least one side was Muslim. The separatists in Chechnya, the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, the Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group in Spain, and last but not least, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda – active in multiple places.
Women and Islam
Gender inequality, even where it takes on a distinctly “Islamic” character, is not specific to Islam as a religion, or Muslim society. Rather, it is a consequence of patriarchy – a phenomenon that knows no religious or cultural boundaries. How patriarchy manifests in any given society, the ways that people – particularly women – respond to it, are simply different. We must be careful not to presume that these differences are qualitative.
