Adventures of Mr. Chris

Earlier this week the FBI announced that they were elevating Black Liberation Army (BLA) and Black Panther Party (BPP) activist Assata Shakur (formerly Joanne Chesimard) to their ‘Most Wanted Terrorist’ list of domestic suspects, making her the only woman in history to have such a designation, and the second US citizen ever to be added to the list. The timing, coming on the 40th anniversary of her alleged killing of a NJ cop, reeks of FBI Cointelpro 2.0, and has the PATRIOT Act, police state and prison-industrial complex slime all over it from head to foot and back again.

Assata Shakur, aunt of the famous rapper Tupac Shakur, has been a thorn in the side of the racist US government since before I was born–as you can see from, the original 1973 FBI wanted poster below. She was a leading Black thinker and activist during the height of the Black liberation struggles of the late 60′s and 70′s, and continues to be a brilliant and outspoken radical from her home in exile of Cuba. She continues to argue she is innocent. You can read the response of her lawyers to the FBI charges here. Read More

In case you haven’t heard, a young girl named Kiera Wilmot was arrested on Monday (4/29) at Bartow High School in Polk County, Florida for a science experiment involving “The Works” (Drano knock-off) and tin foil in a bottle. That’s right, arrested, expelled and now facing felony charges! And it has got many folks in the science community in an uproar, as can be seen here and here and here and also here. And twitter pretty much blew up on #ScienceIsNotACrime and #Solidarity4Wilmot.

For those note familiar, basically how this backyard experiment works is that you mix something like Drano/The Works and aluminum foil together in a closed container–usually a 1 liter soda bottle with a screw cap–which creates an acidic chemical reaction. For the science nerds it’s: 6 HCl _(aq) + 2 Al _(s) —> 2 AlCl_{3 (aq)} + 3 H_{2 (g)}. This chemical process rapidly produces gas which then builds up in the sealed container until the pressure expands the plastic bottle and forces the bottle cap to pop off with a loudish exploding pop and a puff of smoke. Here’s an example of the process–you can find hundreds of similar videos on YouTube and elsewhere online. Read More

In other news, Politix reports on a recent incident where students were allegedly forced to listen to a Christian fundamentalism sermons disguised as a student assembly, this time in a Mississippi public school in Rankin County.

“A Mississippi public high school has caused a furore by forcing students to attend Christian assemblies, students allege. Northwest Rankin High School assemblies were led by local church officials, students claim, and showed Christian video while teachers actually blocked the exits to prevent students leaving.”

Here’s the basic details as reported by local station WAFB 9:

“The Appignani Humanist Legal Center learned from Northwest Rankin High School students that a mandatory assembly was held during school hours on April 9 where a representative of the Pinelake Baptist Church spoke of finding “hope” in “Jesus Christ,” according to a press release from the American Humanist Association.

The group claims that students stated anyone who attempted to leave the April 9 assembly were prevented from doing so. The press release adds that at the end of the presentation, the speakers led the students in a Christian prayer.” Read More

I live in a Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood in the northwestern corner of the Greenpoint area, sandwiched between the BQE, Calvary Cemetery and the East River industrial zone. It’s a lovely little place with a very toxic history dating back centuries, and continuing today. Although the form of the industrial pollution may change from time to time, the basics problem is always the same–oil and synthetic chemicals. If you aren’t paying attention, it’s quite likely that you may have walked right past the latest example of this ongoing industrial disaster zone and not even noticed. Here is an example of what I am talking about, taken while walking home this Friday.

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[Editor's Note: Offensive language follows]

Did you catch the latest white supremacist twitterganza following the MTV movie awards? If not, then check out Public Shaming’s Tweets of Privilege post here. I would say that this sort of thing is shocking, but truth be told, having spent this semester teaching a course on race, immigration and white privilege, and writing and thinking about issues of justice and privilege for a while now, I’m becoming less and less surprised by such incidents, and more and more convinced it speaks to something much deeper in the US psyche. Read More

As I’ve written about before, I had the change to present some of my work on the Anthropocene at the 2013 Western Political Science Association (WPSA) conference in Hollywood recently. For someone writing about this topic, having 3 panels in a row on the subject was great, and gave me lots to think about in terms of not only how I am framing the project, but how others are thinking about this topic as well.

I finally had some time this weekend to put the audio of my talk together with the powerpoint presentation I gave, so now you can experience the whole thing for yourself almost as if you were there in LA. As a bit of context, this talk is based on ongoing research I am doing for my dissertation, which is on the topic of the Anthropocene and its various intersections with environmental politics today. This material in particular is part of the chapter I am writing on the intersection of religious politics and the environment.

The accompanying paper that this talk was derived from can be found here for those interested. To learn more about the Anthropocene, or see more of my writing on it, check out my Anthropocene page on this site. For more on the religion and ecology links, check out the Ecology+Religion page.

Until next time…who’s keeping time!

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More than a year ago I wrote a post about finding some buried New School treasure while working on a class lecture. The image was of MLK Jr. (at left) and it turned out to be part of a 1964 “Race Crisis” series. The public lecture series was hosted at The New School and featured an opening lecture in 1964 (coincidentally on my birthday of Feb 6) by no other than Martin Luther King Jr. That photo discovery led to a long story which is still unfolding today, and which involves many different people, university archives and avenues of exploration. You can read more about this story at the Free Press here. Read More

In case you’ve missed all the hubbub the past few days over the leaked Ford Figo ad from JWT India ad agency in Delhi, here’s the main image that has gotten everyone in an uproar and had Ford and JWT’s PR teams working double time on damage control. Although the ad was never used, the political work is already done.

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This is an opinion piece I wrote in response to an article in the New School Free Press titled “New School’s Experience with Undoing Racism” by Henry Miller, which covers a recent campus workshop on racism I was involved with, and the editorial piece accompanying it by the editorial board, “High Cost, Low Impact.” It was published in a slightly changed form here.

Letter to the Free Press

I was very disappointed by recent Free Press coverage of the Undoing Racism workshop (“The New School’s Experience With Undoing Racism”, Feb 21) at The New School. I believe it displayed a lack of journalistic integrity to the facts and a desire to probe the root causes of an issue. My comments are as a former newspaper editor, a participant in the Undoing Racism workshop, and as someone who teaches, works and cares deeply about issues of justice and power. I want to challenge the Free Press to reflect seriously on how it covers issues of race and privilege at this institute, and to hold the paper to a higher stand of political and journalistic accountability.

Journalistic integrity lives in two places in every newspaper, the reporter and the editor. This story had multiple factual errors, including identifying students as part of the University Student Senate (USS) who are not. While I’m sure the USS doesn’t mind the credit, such errors speak to a lack of attention to basic fact checking. Surely the Free Press can do a better job in the future of paying attention to such details, big or small.

But more problematic was the overall tone of the article and the accompanying editorial comments by the editors (“High Cost, Low Impact“), which focused on the price tag of the workshop. The editors wrote that “In a time of financial austerity at The New School, especially when a hiring freeze remains in force, the program’s price-tag [$15,000] bears examination.” My response to such an arguments is this–what is the “right price” to pay for social justice? If we could have reached 400 students for $150,000, or 1,000 students for $375,000 or 3,000 students for $1.1 million, would it be worth it then? When does social justice stop becoming an exercise in cost-benefit analysis and instead become a passion that drives our mission?

The New School is a predominately white, middle class and ostensibly “progressive” institutions of elite learning, where we talk about the value of equality and justice, but often fall short when we are asked to put those values into practice. The editorial, and the response from some at this school to critiques of institutional racism and white supremacy that workshops like Undoing Racism give voice to, reminds me of the white Alabama ministers telling the civil rights movement to “wait.” MLK Jr’s response to these arguments, which was also addressed to so-called white liberal allies, was that ‘”Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”‘ As long as the white majority–myself included–keep saying “wait” to deal with issues of racism at The New School, we will continue to be the problem, not the price tag of a workshop for social change.

Until next time…let freedom ring.

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As I noted recently, there’s some new data out from several sources showing long-term and historical temperature changes, none of which is encouraging, followed closely by the usual climate denial pr machine. I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past week reading various climate denial blogs and surfing their networks, as I’m finalizing a paper I will be presenting on Christian fundamentalism and the Anthropocene for the upcoming WPSA Conference in Hollywood, CA. And as anyone involved in this work knows, it’s becoming increasingly hard to separate the climate denial movement from Christian fundamentalist movement and their Bible-based attacks on all things green, secular or–well, basically even marginally sane. Read More