Giant
…. —Third Testimony: Ali
….. Butterfly, butterfly on the wall
….. Can’t you hear your country call?
Black man’s got no business being
both pretty and bold—with a right hook
as swift as his banter, his feet
a flurry of insults, disguised as dance.
There’s a war going on, but he’s having
none of it. He flicks those angry eyes,
then flings out a rhyme
quick as tossing a biscuit to a dog.
He’s our homegrown warrior, America’s
toffee-toned Titan; how dare he swagger
in the name of peace? No black man
strutting his minstrel ambitions
deserves these eloquent lips:
Swat him down, pin him to the mat!
On and on they mutter, hellbent on keeping
their own destiny unscathed
& brazenly manifest.
by Rita Dove
from Playlist for the Apocalypse
W.W. Norton and Company, 2021
A: I don’t even have cable anymore.
For most of 2022 I was quietly working on my second book, 
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In the fall of 2015, college campuses were engulfed by fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This is not to say that college students had until then been quiet in the face of police violence against black Americans. Throughout the previous year, it had often been college students who hit the streets, blocked traffic, occupied the halls of justice and malls of America, disrupted political campaign rallies, and risked arrest to protest the torture and suffocation of Eric Garner, the abuse and death of Sandra Bland, the executions of Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott, Tony Robinson, Freddie Gray, ad infinitum.
At first glance, the world of Peanuts was a highly legible one, populated by clearly labeled types. And yet the labels kept leading into uncertainty. Snoopy, for example, was “a beagle.” He also read War and Peace and owned a typewriter. Lucy was a “fussbudget”: she was one always, in some essential way. But what was it about her that was “fussbudget”? Was there a fussbudgetness in all her words and actions or only in some of them? With Pig-Pen, it was somehow even more fundamental. Pig-Pen was dirty 
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VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, mutineer couturier and inexhaustible activist, had a genius for suturing extremes: rebellion and tradition, deconstruction and craft. Born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Cheshire, England, Westwood was a primary-school teacher for many years before she and her second husband, Malcolm McLaren, pioneered the styles, sounds, and attitudes that evolved into the movement known as punk. Her commitment to history and radical politics continued to infuse her work over her six-decade-long career, and when she died on December 29, age eighty-one, the world lost one of its last great iconoclasts. In the pages that follow, writer 
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According to the right, a specter is haunting the United States: the specter of critical race theory (CRT).
Every year, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) chooses the theme for