| Those who spend time on X or pay attention to AOC’s social media have heard she paraphrased New York City Councilman Chi Ossé on ABC, stating that “woke 1”—otherwise known as the political climate stemming from the pandemic-era racial reckoning of 2020—was “crazy.” But was it? This week, Zito Madu argues that all that was crazy was the way “the urgent material demands of the movement” were “siphoned away by elites.”
And of course, racism is still rampant. Not only on our own soil, but, devastatingly, in the United Kingdom, where former Cambridge University Professor Jason Arday tragically passed away last week after rampant bullying. As Jafari Allen, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia, wrote this week, the racism in academia that killed Arday “is not an event,” but “a mode—a dynamic, durable apparatus of subjection and disposability that never runs out of supply.”
For more on Arday, and what it was like to be a Black scholar at Oxbridge, look out for a weekend essay tomorrow by writer Gazelle Mba, who was told by an American professor that if she “wanted to study anything related to Black people,” she “was better off leaving the institution as soon as possible and heading to the United States.”
-Alana Pockros
Associate Editor, The Nation |
