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Toni Morrison, Prophet of America’s Demons (1931-2019)

…our names in favor of the saccharine sweet myths of American greatness and American goodness and American sinlessness. Sometimes Morrison is simply categorized as an “African-American writer”—and she was that of course. But in addition to being a black writer, Morrison was an author of blackness. An author of whiteness too. Her 1992 book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, is one of the most astute literary critical readi…

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Black Media Fails Its LGBTQ Community

…ister. While police brutality is both unbridled and rampant in the African American community, this story carries a special shock. When an African American woman is hit repeatedly by an officer with with handcuffs wrapped around his knuckles, and an African American nurse goes directly to the offending white officer to see if he’s okay we get a hint of another cultural marker—Johnson is a transsexual. Monica Roberts, founder of the African America…

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Thanksgiving Reveals More About Us Than About 17th Century Events

…c story of America’s foundation. The conservative reads a tale about Anglo-American Protestant hegemony and the opening up of North American resources. But the radical, perhaps even the mystical interpreter, reads a more allegorically profound story about America as “Mother of Exiles,” a universal space that encompases all ethnicities, cultures, and religions precisely because of its universality. *** When Welcoming the Stranger Was Not Just a Rel…

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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

…utside of the U.S., particularly in the Middle East and Latin America, the American soap just isn’t what it used to be. In 1970, when American women were more likely to be at home during the day, there were fifteen daytime soaps on the air, with new shows continuing to debut every year. Forty years later, only seven soaps remain, all of them aging. (The newest of these is more than twenty years old.) More alarmingly for fans, timeworn favorites ar…

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Russian Parliament Hosts U.S. Anti-Gay Activist Paul Cameron

…l they might be to host an American billed by this source as a “well-known American psychologist” and a “leading American crusader against homosexuality”—and particularly since he said he had come “to thank the Russian people, the State Duma, and President Putin… in the name of the entire Christian world.” To thank them, that is, for their uncompromising stance against same-sex relations which, in Cameron’s fact-free worldview, are destroying West…

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Electionpocalypse, Part II: The Mythical Jewish Vote

…rly, all Israelis—view Obama as an almost villainous character. “No Jewish American,” the American-born writer Barry Rubin says in the video, “should vote for Obama on the belief that he’s a great friend of Israel.” You should think about, the narrator tells you, “whether Obama will really have Israel’s back when the chips are down.” Mark Zell, co-chair of Republicans Abroad-Israel, recently told reporter Roee Ruttenberg, “in the United States, th…

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Gun-Wielding White Couple Make Perfect Protagonists for Republican Convention’s ‘Great American Story’

…ome housing ruining neighborhoods. Taken together we can see that for many Americans, the “Great American Story” is necessarily bound up with whiteness, Christianity, state-sanctioned violence toward “unruly” minorities, and access to firearms to ensure self-protection. Americans who embrace Christian nationalism and want to see it privileged in the public sphere are much more fearful of the changing demographic and political landscape of the Unit…

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Mitt Romney and the Ghost of Anti-Mormonism

…d Smoot, Mormon Apostle by Kathleen Flake. Flake is associate professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University and may be the nation’s finest scholar of Mormons in American political life. Her book scrutinizes a multi-year Congressional hearing and national show trial occasioned by the 1903 election of an LDS Senator from Utah named Reed Smoot—a trial that interrogated whether observant Mormons could be fit for public office. I spo…

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In ‘The Evangelical Mission to Spread The Gospel to Muslims’ a Journalist Tells a Global Story About Evangelical Missionaries and the Spread of Right-Wing Ideology

…to prepare Latin America for exactly that moment. We could no longer send Americans, so let’s send Latin Americans. I want to send us out with some focus here on rising Christian nationalism, both in the US and in Brazil. Given that context, what do you think American readers need to know about this missionary movement? There is this well-financed wave of pastors and missionaries with a very right-wing neo-evangelical perspective, who have starte…

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Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuse for Perpetrators—or for Provocateurs

…n Benghazi and knew Christopher Stevens, promptly issued an apology to the American people. We should thus consider how local forces might use anti-American sentiment strategically, and understand the difference between anti-American sentiment and the ends towards which it is put. So far, these attacks seem to be outbursts of anger, and not directed acts of political intrigue. Second, it is depressing how easily anti-Muslim sentiment can trigger v…

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