Cancel Culture: A Third Perspective

I have tried to stay out of this conversation for quite a while, but the conversation came to me this week in my classroom. One of my students stumbled into an argument about the recent statement by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease publication of six of his lesser known children’s books. My student was serving

Preserving the Story of Black Women

The preservation of the past is one of the most important aspects of remembering and honoring cultural identity. This may include uncovering artifacts, discovering cultural norms, or retelling folk stories. Remembering and honoring the past is one of the important responsibilities of an anthropologist, and more specifically, the responsibility of an ethnographer.  Zora Neale Hurston

A Better Way: A Look at Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the narrator seeks to reconcile the dying words of his grandfather with navigating his own reality and identity. His grandfather confesses that he had “been a traitor all [his] born days, a spy in the enemy’s country” (16). This is not the reality that he wants for his descendants,

A Discussion of “Two-Ness” in The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Dubois

W.E.B. DuBois builds his claim about the two-ness of black men and women through his book The Souls of the Black Folk. This is not a central focus of his book until “Chapter Ten: Of the Faith of the Fathers” in which he spells out his claim that “From the double life every American Negro