Tag: The New Yorker

  • The Origins of “Privilege” The New Yorker 2014-05-13 Joshua Rothman, Archive Editor The idea of “privilege”—that some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages aren’t discriminatory —has a pretty long history. In the nineteen-thirties, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the “psychological wage” that enabled poor whites to feel…

  • “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because…

  • Going the Distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama. The New Yorker 2014-01-27 David Remnick, Editor Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming. On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving,…

  • Obama’s “Double Consciousness” On Race The New Yorker 2013-07-26 Jonathan Alter, Author, Reporter, Columnist, TV Analyst, Lecturer More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of the black man: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” President Barack Obama’s extemporaneous…

  • The Choice The New Yorker 2012-10-22 The Editors The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s, read a benediction that began with…

  • Barack X The New Yorker 2012-10-08 Jelani Cobb, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African American Studies University of Connecticut 1. It’s mid-March in Harlem and the streets are an improvised urban bazaar. Young men hawk umbrellas, vintage vinyl, and knit caps. The aromas of curry and fried plantains waft out…

  • The Measure of America: How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism The New Yorker 2004-03-08 18 pages Claudia Roth Peierpont Along with the Ferris wheel, the hamburger, Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima, the zipper, Juicy Fruit, and the vertical file, the word “anthropology” was introduced to a vast number of Americans at the World’s Columbian…

  • One Drop of Blood The New Yorker 1994-07-24 Lawrence Wright, Staff Writer Washington in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century largely by black Americans. How much this contest has widened,…