In the last few pages of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad writes that deep social change doesn’t just require mass action. It also requires mass participation in sociopolitical institutions and the social movements that must see old institutions replaced. It’s not enough, Muhammad argues, for scholars and critics to make radical claims without connecting them to […]
A timely example: denial at work
The merchants of doubt are back in business. Just as I wrote about denial in public controversies this weekend, London’s Daily Mail charged yet another climate science data conspiracy. The Daily Mail isn’t new to the game of “If you can’t lie, obfuscate,” but the public’s comprehension of and trust in climate science isn’t a […]
Unbecoming activism
In the second chapter of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad recounts the United States’ role in the evolution of Somalian terrorist group al-Shabab. I wrote briefly about this group six weeks ago in an article on the recent film Eye in the Sky. Like the other decentralized MENA terrorist group that need not be named, al-Shabab […]
Normalization is normal after all
Two words I’ve heard plenty of in the last few months: resistance and normalization. Advocates advise the public to resist the agenda of the new administration. Commentators worry that the administration’s unusual tactics (and more overt expressions of the same old tactics) might reset the typical center and become the US’ new normal. But humans […]
A poetic break
My latest literary companion, Umair Muhammad’s Confronting Injustice, features a sentence that was so arresting that I had to look up both the source and its author. (Get Confronting Injustice the way I did, via Haymarket Books.) Eduardo Galeano wrote through the second half of the 20th Century about the political struggles of his native Uruguay. […]