Philosophy etc.

ALERT: We need to stop spawning and nurturing the view that social/political disputes between opposing writers and thinkers rises to the level of intramural cultural disharmony or racial betrayal by the thinker's views with whom we find disagreement. Disagreement between writers who offer their private thoughts for public consumption is to be expected and celebrated. But so what, they et al. should find grist for social disagreement more often. Maybe then some practical and material social strides can be made. Damn agreement when it's at the cost of imagining different realities by multiple voices. NO! Folks need to stop putting air beneath the wings of contrived issues of little to no consequence to changing the material conditions of those suffering. There's a tendency to bifurcate the opinions of thinkers who seek to contribute to public conversations and then retail those opinions as the only ones of value to be critiqued and considered for reflection. For example, th...

Clarification: Human beings are NOT brands. Brands are passive objects or objectified structures that are manipulated to bend to the will of the "other". For brands see shoes, franchises, potato chips. Human beings are active agents who craft and cultivate reputations. For reputations see Malcolm, Fannie, Toni. Reputations are earned by free agents, not scripted objects to merely serve the aims and aspirations of brand managers. These (positive/negative) reputations are made and molded by agents who actively engage reality as a result of their volition and desire "to be" and become a being of their choosing.

U.S. News&World Report  (a ranking agency with whom I have fundamental methodological issues), ranks Spelman College the #1 HBCU. Sorry, SPELMAN is the Number 1 College in the country for Black folks, Black women in particular. The other ranking of Historically White Colleges & Universities don't consider how poorly or how well the Black population in particular is treated, nor their academic failures and successes peculiar to them when determining a school's overall ranking. We succeed with students whom they would never consider for admissions as well as many of the brightest minds the world will ever know. The HWCUs do quite well at what they aspire to do, but HBCUs do equally well for its demographic. So the #1 HWCU is Princeton--congratulations to them also. We're all good with Spelman leading the way on this end.

I'm very disturbed by the anachronistic perspectives, representations and symbols that have been used to explain and/or contextualise the events and situation that recently observed in Charlottesville, Virginia. The legacy of white supremacy demonstrated in the way that we've just observed extends not to Europe in particular, but to these United States. It is not the case that time heals all wounds. It seems to be more a matter of failure to remember correctly or to recall actual historical occurrences particular to one's contextual suffering is a matter of denial, if not outright selective amnesia. There was no progressive and healing mediation for the legacy of hate and white supremist ideologies past and extant in these United States. So just as there is a rich legacy of trauma endured and manifest in the lives of the victims of white supremacy that is historically, and some have averred genetically passed down, the promulgation of this form of hate and vicious animus em...