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Articles by Christopher Lebron
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic Christopher Lebron Edited by Jacob T.
Against Returning to Normal
Image: Flickr / Amaury Laporte Joe Biden positioned himself as the “return to normalcy” candidate. But normalcy is not something we can afford—we must actively resist it.
Racial Identity & Racial Fraud
Recent stories of racial impersonation, from former professor Jessica Krug to activist Satchuel Cole, raise profound questions about the nature of race. What makes racial identification subject to racial fraud? How do individual and social practices interact in the construction of racial identity? To what extent does race differ from other dimensions of personal identity and modes of cultural belonging?
I Don't Have to Forgive Joe Biden
Flickr: Marc Nozell We should condemn the president-elect’s record on race, but that does not foreclose hope for his administration. I received my first lesson in political philosophy from my father, who passed away this September. Though he never graduated high school, he earned his graduate degree by growing up a deeply chocolate Puerto Rican man in the 1960s and ’70s.
Twelve books that give context to current protests [reading list]
By OUP Academic June 3rd 2020 Cities across the United States have seen ongoing protests since the death of George Floyd while in police custody on 25 May. Conversations are taking place on social media as well as in the real world, and media coverage has been relentless. We at Oxford University Press would like to highlight some of our books across politics, history, and philosophy that we hope can contribute to the important conversations currently taking place and provide valuable context.
How To Talk About Anti-Semitism
A reading list. is and is not anti-Semitism is constantly being pulled into question—especially when it comes to the political project of Zionism. While many progressives have critiqued the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, our latest essay goes further. Authors Donna Nevel and Mark Tseng-Putterman argue, for instance, that the Anti-Defamation League’s research is biased and that it “reflects a broader anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian agenda” that other powerful Jewish institutions share.
How Race Made the Opioid Crisis
Image: Flickr / Delores The opioid crisis and the War on Drugs are intertwined in the mutually reinforcing framework of racial capitalism. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s forthcoming print issue Racist Logic. In March 2018, President Donald Trump delivered a forty-minute speech about the crisis of addiction and overdose in New Hampshire.
The Invisibility of Black Women
With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on the horizon, I dutifully re-watched Ava Duvernay’s powerful and accomplished movie, Selma. The story chronicles King’s struggle to secure unencumbered black suffrage in Selma, Alabama, which led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This time I watched with a particular question in mind: how are the women portrayed? This question is urgent because it is increasingly clear that black women are America’s invisible population.
What Happened to Kanye West?
You can now listen to a reading of Christopher Lebron’s essay by clicking on the “Play” button above! Audio courtesy of curio.io. I first listened to Kanye West’s The College Dropout (2004) while walking from my Section 8 housing complex to the financial district—a sketchy mile long corridor of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I had just graduated from college, and I was transfixed by the album. Its musical production was both mainstream yet artistically distinct and divergent.
What Happened to Kanye West?
Kanye represents what happens when the liberties of artistic genius are confused for political insight. You can now listen to a reading of Christopher Lebron’s essay by clicking on the “Play” button above! Audio courtesy of curio.io. I first listened to Kanye West’s The College Dropout (2004) while walking from my Section 8 housing complex to the financial district—a sketchy mile long corridor of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I had just graduated from college, and I was transfixed by the album.
Deadly Symbiosis
Consider three brute facts about racial inequality and imprisonment in contemporary America: (i) Since 1989 and for the first time in national history, African Americans make up a majority of those entering prison each year.
Europe's Deadly Border
On the night of October 3 a beat-up, unseaworthy freighter left a dock in Tripoli, on the Libyan coast, carrying a human cargo of 500 migrants. Almost all had come from Eritrea and Somalia, through North Africa. The ship was headed across the Mediterranean Sea toward the southernmost piece of Italy, Lampedusa—a small island closer to Libya than to Sicily. In sight of the islet of Conigli its engines stopped and it began to take on water. One passenger set a blanket on fire to signal for help.
Kiese Laymon and Casey Gerald Confront American Success
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon Scribner There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald Riverhead New England winters are brutal affairs, with dry, driving winds that lash at those walking from here to there.
Concerned Citizens
On a warm day in Baltimore last summer, with public school almost out for the year, someone—call her Jane—posts to her neighborhood Facebook page. According to her profile picture, Jane looks to be a white woman in her thirties. She adds four photos of a group of black male teenagers in various formations, mostly looking warily behind them. One carries a hover board. “Are these your kids?” the post begins. Jane says she confronted the teen carrying the hover board.
Can Charles Mills Save Liberal Philosophy From Itself?
Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs represents the culmination of more than two decades of work on the philosophy of race and social justice. Mills received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, working with the left-wing philosophers Frank Cunningham and Daniel Goldstick on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels. In the following years, liberal political philosophy would be strongly challenged.
Can Charles Mills Save Liberal Philosophy From Itself?
Charles Mills’s effort to save liberal political philosophy from itself. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark July 18, 2018 Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Men’s Tennis Is More Interesting Than Women’s
Last week, while bowing out of Wimbledon early, the world’s thirteenth-ranked men’s tennis player, Gilles Simon, reignited a perennial controversy by questioning whether female players should be paid as much prize money as the men. “The equality in salaries isn’t something that works in sport,” the Frenchman said.
Small Donations Pop-Up 05/18
Small Donations Pop-Up 05/18 from Boston Review.
Janelle Monáe for President
What Afrofuturism can teach us about surviving Trump. In a week when five Georgia police assaulted a sixty-five-year-old black woman motorist; a Texas officer choked a young unarmed black man; and a white Yale graduate student called the police to remove a black female student napping in her own campus dorm, I faced the gloom of Donald Glover’s newly released video for “This Is America.” Don’t get me wrong.
Left Behind by Korea’s Success
In South Korea these days, a popular dish at trendy restaurants is budae jjigae—an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stew full of noodles, red pepper paste, Spam, sausages, kimchi, American cheese, baked beans, tofu, and whatever else the chef might want to throw into the mix. Budae means “battalion” in Korean, which points to the stew’s origins in the Korean War.
Guns in the Family
Image: Tina Shaw/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service A childhood steeped in guns shows that toxic masculinity and racism are at the heart of U.S. gun culture. It is impossible for me to remember my father without thinking about guns. My first was a child-sized Winchester 20-gauge shotgun. It was a hand-me-down from a kid across the street. I think I paid twenty-five dollars for it, saved from my allowance and advanced to me by my father for doing yardwork. I was eight.
The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea
Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section of it, and then provide the author(s) an opportunity to respond however they see fit.
Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve
Black Panther, the most recent entry into the Marvel cinematic universe, has been greeted with the breathless anticipation that its arrival will Change Things. The movie features the leader of a fictional African country who has enough wealth to make Warren Buffet feel like a financial piker and enough technological capacity to rival advanced alien races. Such Black empowerment was supposed to change things by effectively challenging racist narratives.
‘Black Panther’ Is Not the Movie We Deserve
Black Panther, a movie unique for its black star power, depends on a shocking devaluation of black American men. Black Panther, the most recent entry into the Marvel cinematic universe, has been greeted with the breathless anticipation that its arrival will Change Things. The movie features the leader of a fictional African country who has enough wealth to make Warren Buffet feel like a financial piker and enough technological capacity to rival advanced alien races.
The Cost of Canonizing MLK
...we need your help. You might have noticed the absence of paywalls at Boston Review. We are committed to staying free for all our readers. Now we are going one step further to become completely ad-free. This means you will always be able to read us without roadblocks or barriers to entry. It also means that we count on you, our readers, for support. If you like what you read here, help us keep it free for everyone by making a donation. No amount is too small.
Police Reform Means Nothing Without Equality and Dignity
Police Reform Means Nothing Without Equality and Dignity The following is an adapted excerpt from the new book The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea by Christopher J. Lebron (Oxford University Press, June 2017), available from Amazon and IndieBound: This list is far from complete. In fact, it’s short by hundreds of names that are the damning evidence of the level of violence against black bodies in America.
The Making of Black Lives Matter with Christopher J. Lebron
Started in the wake of George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and uncompromising campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J.
Keeping the Faith
We Were Eight Years In Power Ta-Nehisi Coates Penguin Random House, $19.36 (paper) These days, the invocation of faith in the transformative possibility of self and society risks naiveté. We live in a time, after all, when the ties that bind us have badly frayed, when we seem unable to properly regard the pain of our fellows, and when political leaders seem hell-bent on exploiting it for gain and to satisfy their own narcissism. To defend the role of faith in political struggle may seem odd.
Tiger Couple Gets It Wrong on Immigrant Success
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America The tiger couple is chasing its own tail, which is to say, they are stuck in circular reasoning. In their new book, The Triple Package, Amy Chua, author of the best-selling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Jed Rubenfeld tackle the question of why certain groups are overrepresented in the pantheon of success.
Christopher Lebron response to Robin Kelley
Compared to past student-activists, who seemed militant when they made their demands at universities such as Cornell by commandeering administrative offices, Kelley thinks there is something of self-abuse in the readiness of today’s student-activists to use the language of trauma to justify change. He prefers that these students embrace James Baldwin’s brand of love in the name of radical politics.
Riding La Bestia
The fifth and sixth questions are: “What countries did you pass through?” and “How did you travel here?” To the first one, almost everyone immediately answers “Mexico,” and some also list Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
What’s in a name: Considering inclusion in the debate about renaming buildings
You can learn a lot about what is and isn’t in a name growing up in low-income urban America. Names can be fluid. Sure, everyone has the name their parents gave them, but they might also have one or many street names that indicate an attitude, a skill or a warning. Names can be dynamic to express oneself to the world. And you might find yourself in real trouble if you’re not from a particular neighborhood and start calling people out by their street names without knowing them.
What's in a Name?
You can learn a lot about what is and isn’t in a name growing up in low-income urban America. Names can be fluid. Sure, everyone has the name their parents gave them, but they might also have one or many street names that indicate an attitude, a skill or a warning. Names can be dynamic to express oneself to the world. And you might find yourself in real trouble if you’re not from a particular neighborhood and start calling people out by their street names without knowing them.
Funding the Resistance
What can we do to support the government administrators—the Bartlebys, as Judith Levine calls them—who would “prefer not to” cooperate with Trump’s orders that they believe to be immoral or unconstitutional? Career civil servants, unlike political appointees, are supposed to implement the policies of a new administration, regardless of their personal political values.
What Totalitarianism Looks Like
At noon on January 20, 2017, a new American era began. Donald J. Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. Immense power was invested in a man with a personal history littered with misogyny, allegations of sexual assault, lawsuits, employees cheated of wages, self-aggrandizement, race baiting, and denial of science. Our president is undeniably a man with a wanting character.
Race Capitalism Justice
Forum is a publication of Boston Review, an independent and nonprofit public space for robust discussion of ideas and culture. Animated by hope and committed to equality, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world. Our first Forum issue just went to press, and we can't wait to share it with you! What will you find?
What Can Blind People Tell Us About Race?
For several years now, a quiet revolution has been underway in consumer electronics. Gadgets that are a part of our everyday lives have learned to see. Relying on optical devices and software that can detect faces and track body motions, cameras, gaming systems, phones, and other tools have gained access to the mechanisms of visions and recognition that were once considered the unique province of sentient beings.
Ferguson Won't Change Anything. What Will?
Jan 5, 2015 17 Min read time Michael Brown shouldn't be a poster child for social justice movements. Photo: Light Brigading On August 9 of last year, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot to death an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown. Immediately after this tragic event eyewitnesses provided conflicting accounts of what transpired between the officer and the young man.
Lynching by Any Other Name
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
Lynching by Any Other Name
Prosecutors are corrupting the intent of lynching laws. From the early 1900s until 1938, the NAACP flew an anti-lynching flag from its Manhattan headquarters. / Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records On June 2 Jasmine Richards, founder of the Pasadena, California, chapter of Black Lives Matter, was convicted of “felony lynching” and sentenced to ninety days in prison and three years on probation.
The Invisibility of Black Women
Tessa Thompson portraying Diane Nash in Selma. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Black women go missing—from civil rights history and from our lives. With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on the horizon, I dutifully re-watched Ava Duvernay’s powerful and accomplished movie, Selma. The story chronicles King’s struggle to secure unencumbered black suffrage in Selma, Alabama, which led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This time I watched with a particular question in mind: how are the women portrayed?
Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment by Michael Javen Fortner The images inspired by Michael Javen Fortner’s new book, Black Silent Majority, are revealing. A New Yorker review featured a graphic rendering of somber black men clad in orange jumpsuits imprisoned behind a fence made from the bodies of neatly dressed black men and women.
Don't Trouble Yourself
In his latest book, Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist, argues that evolution by natural selection created human races with different genetic predispositions for social behavior. As races evolved following divergent migrations out of Africa, their social behavior diverged and became written in their genes.
White Flights
There’s a moment toward the end of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping when Ruth, the young narrator whose mother has recently committed suicide, finds herself utterly alone. She is exploring an abandoned homestead at the edge of a lake while her eccentric and unreliable aunt Sylvie has wandered off, perhaps never to be seen again.
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