Three Steps Forward and a Huge Step Back
This week was an exercise in cognitive dissonance for those who work for and believe in equal rights. With major side eye to anonymous NFL team executives who seem to think it will be a “distraction” (spare us, please), we applaud Michael Sam for his courage in coming out as the soon-to-be first out gay player in the NFL – with an honorable mention for his coaches and teammates at newly-of-the-Southeastern-Conference University of Missouri (and some current NFL players) for offering him the support he deserves. From the SEC to Old Virginia, the good news continued across the South: a federal judge in Norfolk struck down Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. We’ve been waiting since 2006 to say this and mean it: Virginia is for lovers, y’all. And capping it off for Valentine’s Day: words don’t do justice to Ellen Page’s coming-out speech, which has gone viral. Haven’t watched it? Just do it.
These strides forward made an already bitter pill – the mistrial in Michael Dunn’s trial for the murder of Jordan Davis – even harder to swallow (hence the cognitive dissonance). A friend of TBQ asked on Facebook, “What is wrong with you, Florida?” Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best we’ve read on this topic so far:
Spare us the invocations of “black-on-black crime.” I will not respect the lie. I would rather be thought insane. The most mendacious phrase in the American language is “black-on-black crime,” which is uttered as though the same hands that drew red lines around the ghettoes of Chicago are not the same hands that drew red lines around the life of Jordan Davis, as though black people authored North Lawndale and policy does not exist.
Read it, get angry, refuse to be silent.
Voices Carry
Whose voices do we hear or read in public? This question drives a lot of what we do here at TBQ and it came up this week in debates over academics as public intellectuals. Over at the NYT, Nicholas Kristof proclaimed, “Professors We Need You!” – begging academics to climb down from the ivory tower and make themselves relevant. Unsurprisingly, a whole group of academics answered back essentially by pointing out, “We definitely want to be needed, but that cloistered ivory tower look is so 1980s – we left that behind years ago.”
Speaking of speaking, writers are standing up to be counted over on Twitter as part of “I Count” #VidaCount. Post some selfies and show the Twitterverse that women writers are everywhere and their voices are for everyone.
From the TBQ Community Around the Internets
ICYMI, Blog Edition: We’re especially proud of some of the work that appeared on the blog this past week. We want to recognize Dvora Meyers and Jorja Knauer for their insightful analysis of political protest at the Olympics and suppression of free speech in Russia in the shadow of Sochi, along with Mark Chiusano, whose coverage of climate change protests in Salem, Mass. is definitely worth the read.
With writers as great as these, it’s lucky for us that we have the editors to match: spotlight this week on our senior editor, Jonathan Giuffrida, who does it all for TBQ and shows off his policy moxie in this interview with Brian Collins (CFO of the City of Memphis) and this piece on the overprescription of antibiotics (both from Chicago Policy Review – TBQ is nationwide, folks).
Congratulations to contributing editor Rob Goodman and his co-author, our advisory editor Jimmy Soni, on the release of the paperback edition of Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar. Buy it here!
What have you been reading, making, doing this week? Hit us up in the comments on this holiday Monday…
image credit: flickr/QThomas Bower