Tweet [Note: The authors of this post are Amina Zarrugh, Luis A. Romero, and Paige Buell] DNA testing related to ancestry has become very popular in the United States, with roughly 1 in 7 Americans utilizing a mail-in DNA service according to survey data collected by the Pew Research Center in 2019 . Leading companies in this industry, such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe, report upwards of 18 million and 12 million DNA customers, respectively, around the world with combined revenue of billions of dollars. The social impact of ancestry DNA testing varies widely but, in the Pew Research Center surve ..read more

Working within a white liberal frame is not only frustrating for progressive African Americans who speak out honestly and forcefully about racism and other forms of social oppression: it often entails vilification that, in addition to being toxic to our mental and physical well-being, is actually hostile to our very existence. I have dealt with this type of racial madness for the more than four decades I have worked within predominantly “white” academia where I am “tolerated” only when my politics do not venture beyond conflict-aversive, white liberalism. It seems like mission impossible for m ..read more

Tweet Over the course of embracing of Feagin and Ducey’s concept of the elite-white-male (EWM) dominance system, I have often found myself asking the following question: Where does white nationalism fit into the broader EWM dominance system? In this blog post, I argue that white nationalism was/is the foundational cultural capital through which the EWM politics are mobilized. When the EWM dominance system is threatened, particularly through the perpetual quest for liberation and justice by Black Americans, non-elite whites tend to polarize to often violent forms of white nationalism. As I argu ..read more

Tweet Increased numbers in Covid-19 continue to paralyze the world. Peoples’ hope is that a vaccine will soon be the solution. However, before this happens, we need to be scrutinizing the methods of how we arrived at the vaccine. As more global conversation is taking place around the systemic global oppression of Black and brown people, the medical establishment has been called out. Colonialism did not part ways with medical research and there are hundreds of years of unethical research and trials that have harmed colonized subjects. Although the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies are well known known ..read more

Tweet On this Independence day it is well to remember yet again a probing and candid speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” given by the formerly enslaved and probably greatest 19th century (male) American, Frederick Douglass, at Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, at the peak of North America slavery (indeed, about 230 years into that era).   In this era Black Americans were usually not allowed at 4th of July celebrations in the slaveholding South, apparently because many slaveholders feared that they might get an idea of freedom from such events (as if they did not alrea ..read more

Tweet “If we are going to talk about the total liberation of Black people, we first have to liberate ourselves from the material conditions of our oppression… [to] seize the wealth from all the giant corporations that exploit and control the lives of all working people, but particularly Black people.” (Dr. Angela Davis) When Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors started #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, the movement faced widespread, bipartisan backlash. Conservatives called it a terrorist organization that encouraged violence against police. Liberals scolded activists for “yelling ..read more

Tweet Over the past two weeks, or so, there has been a sea change in racial attitudes among European Americans due to the spate of police killing: including those of Breonna Taylor, Ahmuad Arbery, Dreason Reed, George Floyd, and most recently Rayshard Brooks. This has included a shift in the attitudes of even some “white” Republicans. Indeed, much has changed in the two years since I wrote Killing African Americans: Police and Vigilante Violence as a Racial Control Mechanism. European Americans are now acknowledging, with the most straightforward language seen in this nation’s history, that Am ..read more

Tweet As some readers know, I have been researching and writing on Black antiracist movements, revolts, and rebellions now since 1970. With Harlan Hahn, I did the major social science book on the hundreds of 1960s Black “riots” against systemic racism, especially white policing racism (Ghetto Revolts: The Politics of American Violence, 1973, Macmillan) The current, mostly nonviolent protests against anti-black racism are similar in a number of ways to the 1960s Black civil rights movements, which I have researched in a number of places since 1970 as well. They are also similar to many uprising ..read more

Tweet The UCLA Chicano Network has a nice summary of the holiday Cinco de Mayo, which is celebrated in Mexican American communities (one such celebration in California a couple of years ago, pictured right, photo credit) and not yet much outside those communities: Cinco de Mayo is a date of great importance for the Mexican and Chicano communities. It marks the victory of the Mexican Army over the French at the Battle of Puebla. Although the Mexican army was eventually defeated, the “Batalla de Puebla” came to represent a symbol of Mexican unity and patriotism. . . . Cinco de Mayo’s history has ..read more

Tweet Throughout the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, sports have been at the center of much public and private discussion in the United States (U.S.) and around the world. For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) was “at the forefront” of spreading awareness about the pandemic in the U.S., particularly when players began contracting and spreading the virus amongst themselves. In the early stages of the spread of the virus, the state of Florida declared World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) to be an “essential business” – allowing for the production of professional wrestling matc ..read more