Author: James Bliss

As another school year comes to an end, another cohort of students must take stock of their relationship to “the real world.” This is experienced differently for different groups, of course.

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Earth Day has passed once again (let’s hope you planted a tree and picked up some litter this Saturday), but that’s no reason for us to get lax on our personal ecology. Saving the Earth is easy, after all. As a species we may be living at the edge of a precipice, but — if the “Go Green!” boosters are to be believed — there are simple things we can each do every day to avoid a cataclysm.

There’s a broad strain of American political discourse that considers race a myth, an illusion that, if we work diligently to expose as false, will wither away into the dustbin of history. A greater and more pernicious one is the old myth of social progress; that racism is a musty old problem that, as time passes, becomes less and less of a vital issue.