HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.
The Secret History Randall Kennedy’s claim that respectability politics has “improved the racial situation dramatically” [“Lifting as We Climb,” Essay, October], overstates the centrality of that phenomenon to black freedom struggles. Kennedy believes that he is providing a historical corrective to today’s young activists, who condemn attempts by police and their defenders, and by mass-media outlets, to discredit and criminalize African-American victims of police and vigilante violence. These activists know what Kennedy apparently does not: that respectability ideologies have a deeply problematic history. It is ironic that in his attempt to lecture those critical of respectability politics, Kennedy misreads the history of the civil-rights movement. Whi le Kennedy notes that E. D. Nixon made Rosa Parks the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott because of her “exemplary image and…
I have come to perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings—a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any particular substrate—a “connectome” thinking at fantastic speeds, light, effulgent, deathless. The beings are ourselves a thousand or ten thousand years in the future, networked across galactic distances and accompanied by every human consciousness that has ever existed, resurrected from the abysm of time by quantum recovery techniques that even now can be shown not to violate the laws of physics. And I have come to perceive how we on Earth now must begin the task of bringing this future about. Actually, I don’t perceive all this myself. But I spent a long day recently in the social-activities room of the New York…
From The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, a memoir by Austin Reed, published this month by Random House. Likely completed in 1858, the manuscript was discovered at an estate sale, acquired by Yale in 2009, and authenticated by Caleb Smith, a professor there. Reed was an African-American freeman born circa 1823 in Rochester, New York. The events described below took place when he was around ten years old. I had been with Mr. Lad three days when he one morning, being a little angry, ask me if I was ready now to go to work and learn to be a farmer. I told him no, that I was goin’ to start for Home that very day, to which he said that I had been whining about Home…
Why write at all? The card dated 1953 is in my notebook, where I don’t want to ever forget it or what people are that are gone, names, never come to see, I never met Carmelita Vallejo Sept. 8, ’53 Born Madrid, N.M. Father Frank Vallejo Born Zacatecas, Mex. Address of father or guardian in Socorro hospital Occupation of father or guardian used to be a miner This is all as if it almost never was, the town empty, the school the late afternoon broken in and no window left, and the books the records thrown there in the dirt in circles Carmelita Vallejo, Carlos Peña mi peña almost it all is that o human structures that fall apart all the blood left is these objects as if there were…
From posts by residents of Oakland, California, to NextDoor and Glenfriends, two online social networks for neighbors. Silver Dodge Caravan, two Latino male occupants, not particularly young. When I took a long look at them, they consulted with one another and headed off. This is historically the week people come to take your Christmas presents. One African-American man claiming to be my neighbor just rang my doorbell. He wanted to know if I had a chain to move a car. He did NOT look nor sound like any neighbor I know. My houseguest saw a strange person early Friday morning. Slight, dark-skinned, with an Afro/curly hair and weird lipstick. Couldn’t tell if person was a man or woman. Was checking out our cars and staring at our house/windows from the…
From a complaint filed in October 2014 on behalf of a woman who was harassed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Harris County, Texas. In October 2015, the officer, Patrick Quinn, pleaded guilty to official oppression and was sentenced to a year in jail. Ms. S was traveling north when she observed a police car traveling south. She was doing the speed limit and not otherwise breaking any traffic laws. However, she noticed the car make a sharp U-turn and catch up to her. The officer pulled in behind her once she stopped, asked for her driver’s license and proof of insurance, and told her that her insurance was expired. The officer then told her that he smelled marijuana in her car. Ms. S consented to a…
