A forum for language, culture, and history, and what-not
Please check out this panel discussion with myself and Dr. Marlon Swai and Dr. Keshia Abraham on language and race, and implications for the classroom and beyond.
A recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece by Joseph Epstein was entitled “Is there a Doctor in the White House? Not if you need an MD: Jill Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic”. In addition to the piece being sexist (as many female professors and professional women are often called Miss, Mrs., Ma’am, and even worse by their students, colleagues, clients, and patients) and personally disrespectful to Dr. Jill Biden (kiddo, to a grown-ass woman?), I argue that the question itself is rather banal, if not adolescent. At any rate, I would like to […]
Originally, a racecard was “a printed card giving information about the horse races scheduled for a particular race meeting.” Its first attested use was in 1836 (Oxford English Dictionary Online). The newer, two-word play on ‘racecard’, ‘race card’, came on the scene a century and a half later, around 1974, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online. It has a different meaning, but one related to, and probably derived from, the original meaning. According to Merriam-Webster, a race card is “the issue of a person’s race as it relates to a particular contest (such as a political campaign or a court trial) —often used […]
If evolution is progressive and the first humans were from Africa, what is the unarticulated assumption about the European and the African? The Neanderthal Man was the first homo sapien (or, thinking man). Interestingly he was discovered in the Neander Valley in Germany. His African predecessors (homo habilis and homo erectus) were nit wits. 19th Germany, Britain and France were in a race to prove that intelligent humans came from their respective soils. Ernst Haeckel, prominent (and extremely influential) 19th German century naturalist promulgated evolutionary theory that “provided scientific support for the particularly virulent racism that infected some strands of […]
This is my first blog post ever.