Home » OpEd
Category Archives: OpEd
Seeing Our Way Free
By Wesley Hogan New ways of looking at the world never fail to create within me feelings of both excitement and awkwardness, like learning a new dance step. When I became director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in 2013, my training was an oral historian, so I asked my colleagues for advice on […]
To Go Down Dilapidated: A Case For Removing Confederate Monuments
By Mark Anthony Neal As protests go, the pulling down of Confederate monuments is low-hanging fruit. They are largely symbolic acts directed at symbols that, by and large, have long been relegated to unread history books and museums. But low-hanging fruit can also be poisonous. State laws passed to protect these monuments—to weaponize them—are now […]
‘Don’t Get It Twisted:’ Black Girls’ Dehumanization Is Not the Same as Adultification
by Linda M. Burton & PhD & Donna-Marie Winn, Ph.D. Ask NBC News. They recently learned what happens when you tweet a story with a headline that erroneously twisted Sally Hemmings’ personal narrative of horrific, repeated rapes at the hands of Thomas Jefferson into a headline about her being Jefferson’s mistress. NBC News learned […]
The Juice Box Incident and the Erasure of Black Girlhood
by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile) It has come to be known in our family as the “juice box incident”. I was called to my youngest daughter’s kindergarten class at a local charter school because she was being suspended. Apparently, my daughter had been accused of purposely squeezing juice, from […]
1974 | Rock Your Baby by George McCrae
From PBS American Experience Collection, Songs of Summer: By Mark Anthony Neal His wife was supposed to sing it. George McCrae’s own music career had languished in Palm Beach clubs, in what might be thought of as an upscale chitlin’ circuit. At the time, he was about to go back to school to study law […]
Swimming Upstream
Excerpt from “Swimming Upstream,” published Aug. 9, in The Unfeated: “When we moved to the North Carolina Triangle region in 2004, we enrolled both our daughters in the swimming program at the local YMCA — the national organization is one of the largest facilitators of swim safety and competitive swimming. My oldest daughter was just […]
