The Forum - news and commentary

07/03/2023

"Masters of repeated association, Fox’s cable TV programs mentioned CRT nearly four thousand times in 2021," helping conservative legislators and activists scapegoat antiracist scholars and ideas in their "war on wokeness."

How Ron DeSantis and the Florida GOP have created a moral panic, scapegoating CRT as the latest villain in their “war on the woke.”

06/03/2023

Much like “voter fraud,” the term “critical race theory” can mean whatever DeSantis needs it to mean to justify his anti-democratic agenda. Read on the manufacturing of the Florida CRT panic.

How Ron DeSantis and the Florida GOP have created a moral panic, scapegoating CRT as the latest villain in their “war on the woke.”

06/03/2023

New : Sam Hoadley-Brill on the rhetorical tools utilized by rightwing fear-mongers like Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo.

How Ron DeSantis and the Florida GOP have created a moral panic, scapegoating CRT as the latest villain in their “war on the woke.”

20/06/2022

For Juneteenth, a deep dive by Anthony Conwright on its history and how—thanks to vagrancy laws and the 13th amendment—emancipation did not represent slavery’s end but its perfection.

"For Juneteenth to be a legible symbol of American freedom, in the grain of other patriotic national holidays, it needs to reference a redemptive narrative arc, leading from slavery to liberation to something akin to material racial equality. That’s a vision at odds with the actual history of emancipation in this country—and to complicate matters further, the dominant narrative of racial redemption now gaining traction in our national politics is distinctly ahistorical and non-empirical."

https://forummag.com/2022/06/17/juneteenth-and-the-fables-of-emancipation/

20/06/2022

Hello and welcome to the official debut of our site, forummag.com!

The Forum is a source of news and commentary deploying the insights of critical race theory, and supplying the materials and organizing strategies to re-envision American democracy from the ground up.

We conceived of The Forum to fill in the gaping blindspots of a broken media ecosystem—to center the urgent demands of racial justice and democracy in the public discourse that shapes the most fundamental perceptions of what our government is for and who it serves.

We will meet this need with content stressing the grassroots mandates of democratic reform in our multiracial society; it will not treat politics as the sport of elite insiders or as fodder for culture-war clickbait, but rather as the urgent business before us all as Americans seeking to redeem the battered promise of expansive, truly democratic self-rule and solidarity in an age of racialized resentment and neoliberal division.

We were proud to partner with WeShouldDoitAll for the design and development of our site. Please join us at forummag.com, and follow us here on Facebook and Twitter.

https://forummag.com

28/04/2022

New: The Plunder Artist

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is an act of colonial hubris
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-plunder-artist-musk

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is an act of colonial hubris

28/04/2022

Blinded by the White

Undoing the presumptions of whiteness, one searching discussion at a time
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-targeted-teacher-blinded-by-white

Undoing the presumptions of whiteness, one searching discussion at a time

28/04/2022

The White Face of Refugee Aid
How the Ukraine crisis has exposed longstanding biases in Western asylum policies
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-white-face-refugee-aid

How the Ukraine crisis has exposed longstanding biases in Western asylum policies

07/04/2022

New: The latest in our series that features the experiences and reflections of an educator seeking to teach the truth about race in America.

https://www.aapf.org/theforum-targeted-teacher-questioning-race

How teachers can help dismantle a lethal social fiction

07/04/2022

White Anxiety, Redefined

The psychic wages of disfiguring the meaning of critical race theory
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-white-anxiety-redefined

The psychic wages of disfiguring the meaning of critical race theory

17/03/2022

Diary of a Targeted Teacher is a recurring column featuring the experiences and reflections of an educator seeking to teach the truth about race in America in the midst of a campaign to suppress all such classroom discussions.

This week, an essay about helping students talk honestly about race in a political culture that doesn’t want them to.

"Teaching race calls for a deeper definition of love: a process built not of saccharine niceties, but of something tangible and real, relationships forged, arrogance and unknowing replaced with humility and a desire to repair, not just argue."

Read and share:
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-targeted-teacher-illegal-work

Helping students talk honestly about race in a political culture that doesn’t want them to

10/03/2022

NEW: Rafia Zakaria on the racist myths behind Vladimir Putin’s power grabs

https://www.aapf.org/theforum-white-russian-empire

The racist myths behind Vladimir Putin’s power grabs

03/03/2022

Unwoke and Illiberal

A behind-the-scenes dispatch from the vanguard flank of the anti-CRT school wars
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-unwoke-and-illiberal

Bret Stephens had come to Boston’s historic Copley Plaza Hotel bearing an ominous warning: Illiberalism is on the march, and free speech is under siege. As it happens, his claim was borne out by the growing number of states that have now enacted education gag orders, restricting how teachers can t...

03/03/2022

Recalls Rebuffed

Defeating the CRT moral panic, one school board election at a time
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-recalls-rebuffed

Defeating the CRT moral panic, one school board election at a time

03/03/2022

The Worst of Times

How the paper of record enables the CRT moral panic
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-the-worst-of-times

How the paper of record enables the CRT moral panic

03/03/2022

Erasing Toni Morrison’s Vision

How today’s racial panics distort the great novelist’s legacy
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-erasing-toni-morrisons-vision

How today’s racial panics distort the great novelist’s legacy

03/03/2022

Mixed Martial Authoritarianism

How an extreme sport has become a breeding ground for rightwing militance and conspiracy mongering
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-mixed-martial-authoritarianism

On Nov. 10, 2021, Scott Fairlamb—an imposing, bearded man who once competed as a mixed martial arts fighter—became the first person to plead guilty to assaulting a police officer during the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison, one of the most severe punishme...

03/03/2022

Memorializing a Medical Predator

J. Marion Sims’ all-too-slow fall from scientific renown speaks volumes about the institutions that shore up white male impunity
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-memorializing-a-medical-predator

J. Marion Sims’ all-too-slow fall from scientific renown speaks volumes about the institutions that shore up white male impunity

03/03/2022

Lone-Star Inquisition

How the Texas book ban harks back to the heyday of the Confederacy
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-lone-star-inquisition

How the Texas book ban harks back to the heyday of the Confederacy

03/03/2022

The United States of REDMAP

Without voting rights reform, the GOP is free to create a future where elections don’t matter
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-united-states-of-redmap

With the collapse of critical voting rights legislation in Congress, it’s long past time to own up to a basic and devastating truth: The Republican Party has rewired American democracy into a game it cannot lose. Small wonder that GOP leaders show such little regard for our policy preferences, fun...

03/03/2022

Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-critical-race-theory-crackdown

“Acts of forgetting,” wrote the French philosopher Ernest Renan in 1882, play an indispensable role in “the creation of a nation.” Peoples congregate into nations not only under shared memories of triumph and glory, Renan observed; for a nation to cohere, Renan thought, the “deeds of viole...

03/03/2022

January 6 and the F Word

How the Trumpian putsch for power echoes the early fascist French insurrection of February 6
https://www.aapf.org/theforum-january-6-fascism

The day after last year’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, I emailed the historian Robert Paxton to ask his thoughts on this stark new turn in American politics. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism and the leading scholar of Vichy France and the French far right, had been previously reluctan...