When Senator Booker told Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that he couldn’t help but look at her and see his own mother, I knew exactly what he meant. I saw my own mother, a Black woman, and I thought about her and what it might’ve meant to her as a little girl to have seen this moment.
Category: Language/Words
Neera Tanden’s Behavior Actually is That Bad
Bruenig writes “When people say Republican senators are acting in bad faith about the tweets, what are they saying their real position on tweets is? Are liberals who were mad at Trump’s tweets but not Neera’s also doing bad faith? And what is their non-bad-faith position on tweets?
Donald Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was our most American President
In the meantime, we’re going to have to wrestle with Donald Trump and recognizing that part of why he so arouses our disgust is because we see him in ourselves. If we don’t like what we see, it’s up to each of us to change it.
How World War I unleashed total war and the power of propaganda
Nov. 11, now called Veterans Day, was originally Armistice Day, a commemoration of the end of World War I, in 1918, the cessation of
I Know the Identity of the anonymous Op-Ed writer
The last editorial I wrote for Occasional Planet was on the dangers of a potential post-Trump “unity government”. Consisting of centrists and ostensibly anti-Trump
On-line comments: Where racism reigns
Against the advice of my cardiologist, I occasionally look at the on-line comments at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website. No surprise the comments are
Seven words now banned at the Centers for Disease Control
If you work at the Centers for Disease Control—the nation’s top public health agency—you are now officially banned from using the following seven words:
Pocahontas: Native Americans respond to Trump’s latest slur
At a ceremony honoring Native American code-talkers, Donald Trump managed to work in one of his favorite slurs—calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” I don’t
A lexicon of sexual misconduct: There’s a word for what he did to you
When a 94-year-old ex-president gropes your backside, is it sexual assault, sexual harassment, inappropriate touching or what? As women, at long last, feel confident
Toxic word spills are poisoning democracy
Just one week into the Trump presidency, the newly inaugurated president and his circle of sycophants are working overtime to convince us that words