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diversity
Who's Afraid of Diverse Histories?
Instead of warning Americans away, we should safeguard exhibits, lesson plans, and art that tell diverse histories. They help us understand our country better.
Aug 30, 2026
In a recent, high-profile dispute, the president castigated the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for failing to “present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated.” His showdown with its director, Anthea Hartig, followed a contentious House subcommittee hearing at which Republicans openly chastised her for similar reasons. The White House has now directed that the National Park Service install signage outside the building warning visitors of alleged inaccuracies within.
Many of the museum’s current exhibits commemorate the country’s diverse histories in honor of the American semiquincentennial. The president is wrong that these displays pander and divide. Rather, they educate Americans on often overlooked events in our own country.
Take my wheelhouse, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history. It gets the Smithsonian treatment in an exhibit canvassing Filipino American history from the 1910s to the 1970s. In fact, Asian Americans have been here since before the Declaration of Independence—from the crew of a Spanish expedition in 1587 to a mid-1700s settlement in the swamplands near New Orleans. I bet your school textbooks never taught that.
A robust American education requires that we preserve more of these stories: in museums, in the classroom, and in broader popular culture. To our credit, we are beginning to do so. Five years ago, Illinois passed the first state-level mandate to teach AAPI history in classrooms. Since then, local pilot programs and legislation in 23 states have expanded AAPI history in K-12 social-studies curricula. These efforts have accompanied moves in many school districts to teach diverse content, including Black, women’s, and LGBTQ+ histories.
Whatever one’s political leanings, having more information about our shared past allows us to draw more educated conclusions about our present.
Still, 55% of Americans cannot name a single event or policy related to Asian Americans. That means more than lacking familiarity with a racial group. Without knowing the past, and how diverse communities influenced it, we cannot fully understand many of today’s legal institutions and enforcement activities.
For example, immigration enforcement at our Southern border first became a priority during the era of Chinese Exclusion. To skirt detention at Angel Island, new arrivals from China increasingly entered the country via Mexico. Around 1904, mounted federal agents began patrolling the border in response. Over time, their duties expanded from immigration to general law enforcement. In conjunction with the Texas Rangers, they engaged in confrontations, sometimes fatal, with Tejanos and others accused of smuggling illicit goods.
The border, it hardly requires pointing out, haunts national politics still, with mass detention, visas, and the status of sanctuary cities dominating the news cycle. The construction of a physical border wall, meanwhile, threatens to disrupt our relations with Native American tribes and jeopardize our national parks.
Other links between past and present abound. For example, many contemporary labor movements share DNA with those that AAPI workers led. The American History Museum’s exhibit on Filipino Americans explores the decades-long organizing work of Larry Itliong, which culminated in his leadership of the 1965 Delano grape strike alongside Cesar Chavez. The latter is a household name, and the former should be.
Similarly, the movie Sinners brought attention to the role of Chinese American grocers in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow. They played complex roles in their local communities, testing and fortifying racial hierarchies in turn. They sold goods to Black patrons on credit, breaking the dominance of extractive plantation commissaries. But they also brought legal challenges that reinforced the premise of “separate but equal,” such as a suit in which they argued for their children’s admission into white schools while accepting the need for separate Black schools. How Chinese American families lived in and navigated the political climate of the postbellum South sheds light on little-known facets of the region’s economy and institutions.
I learned about all these events as an adult, reading texts on my own (such as Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America). And far from diminishing my patriotism, as the president apparently fears, each of these stories has strengthened my belief in the resilience of all Americans—and in the idea that America itself is a collective project.
Instead of warning Americans away, we should safeguard exhibits, lesson plans, and art that tell diverse histories. They help us understand our country better. Whatever one’s political leanings, having more information about our shared past allows us to draw more educated conclusions about our present. Democracies rely on informed citizens. And the way to build an informed citizenry is to treat diverse histories as a vital part of our national inheritance.
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How Riding the Subway as a Kid Changed the Way I See the World
At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity.
Aug 23, 2026
It was 1974. The Bronx was burning. Abandoned cars littered the streets, and New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. I’m still surprised my overprotective Holocaust-survivor parents let their preteen daughter ride the subway to school every day, but somehow they did.
For five years—from eighth grade through high school—I took the No. 5 Dyre Avenue train from our apartment in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx to my Jewish day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The commute was nearly an hour each way and always coincided with rush hour.
Mornings weren’t so bad; I lived near the beginning of the line and could usually get a seat. But heading home, the 86th Street platform was packed five to eight people deep.
When it was my turn to board, I would throw my entire body weight onto the person in front of me, as the person behind me did the same. We all pushed forward together, forcing ourselves into an already crammed car, as more people tried to pack in behind us.
The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize.
Once the doors closed, we stood packed together in a dense sea of bodies. When the train lurched, the entire crowd swayed as one. Usually, I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of sweat and bad breath. I tried to pull away from a hand on my behind that might have been accidental, but probably was not. I remember thinking I was too young for this.
At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity.
Now, like three-quarters of Americans, I go everywhere by car. It’s faster and more convenient but I never see my fellow travelers—only their vehicles speeding past on the highway. And while I don’t miss the discomfort of the subway, I feel more cut off from other people’s lives.
When you don’t see people, you know them less. When entire groups remain unseen it becomes easier to turn them into abstraction—to fear them, dismiss them, or vilify them. It’s much harder to do that when you’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with someone, both of you grasping the pole as the train jolts you from side to side.
These were the days before smart phones or even portable music players. There was little to distract me from just looking and listening to the people around me. For two hours a day, I heard people speaking Spanish. I absorbed its rhythms long before I understood the words. Years later, when I finally learned the language, I picked it up quickly.
The subway exposed me to a depth of poverty I hadn’t seen in my own working-class Jewish neighborhood. I saw people asleep on the seats, curled around garbage bags that held everything they owned. There was a young man with no legs or lower torso who moved through the cars on a wheeled platform, collecting money. I watched him cross the treacherous gaps between cars as the train rattled and swayed.
The subway also showed me where people lived. Unlike highways, which are designed to bypass neighborhoods, the elevated train trestle cuts straight through them.
The No. 5 ran through the South Bronx at a time when more than 80% of buildings had burned or been abandoned. On dark winter evenings, we passed through blocks of hollowed-out shells, with the occasional occupied apartment. From the train I could see into people’s living rooms, glowing blue from the television.
As a teenager, I didn't know much about redlining, disinvestment, or the policies that had helped create those conditions. I only knew that children my age lived there and I wondered what it was like to grow up in what felt like a war zone.
There are, of course, other ways to encounter difference. My husband, a nurse in one of the poorest communities in Massachusetts, has cared for people from all walks of life. But that’s a different kind of interaction. People meet him when they’re sick, in pain, or in crisis. When you commute, you’re simply sharing space.
But not all forms of transportation create the same kind of shared space. Recently, riding the Amtrak train home from Philadelphia, I watched miles of rundown brick rowhouses slide past the window. Some were boarded up. Inside the train, however, the conversations I overheard were about road races in Cancun and the best spin classes in Manhattan. The passengers' lives appeared far removed from the neighborhoods we were passing through.
Having last lived in a city decades ago, my rural life is now quieter, more controlled. I move from one place to another sealed inside a car. It’s comfortable and efficient. But it’s made my life smaller. It’s made it possible to live a life where one rarely sees anyone outside one’s own orbit.
How can that not affect one’s ability to empathize—if your neighbors, coworkers, and classmates all reflect some version of yourself? The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize.
Which is not to say that riding the No. 5 Dyre Avenue made me a kinder person. I still judge people; I could be nicer and more patient. But the commute gave shape and texture to lives I might otherwise reduce to stereotypes. Day after day, it reminded me that everyone, just like me, was simply trying to get home.
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New York’s Childcare Expansion Could Redefine Early Education
The question is not only how many seats we create, but what those seats make possible and whether we are willing and able to build the systems needed to sustain them.
Aug 22, 2026
Imagine 2-year-old Malek, growing up in an Arabic-speaking home, entering childcare for the first time. At home, language carries feeling, memory, and family connection. In care, it may be the first time he learns that only one language is recognized and that the other must stay behind. As New York City expands care for 2-year-olds, the public conversation has largely centered on key logistics: seats, speed to implementation, and salaries for home-based providers. Another fundamental question is how this expansion will shape children’s relationships to language, community, and belonging, especially for multilingual families whose experience with formal education is associated with estrangement from their home culture and language.
For decades, growing up with more than one language was wrongly framed as a deficit; it was once described as “semilingualism.” A large body of research has documented the social, communicative, and educational benefits of multilingualism, including stronger connections to family and community, and broader cultural and economic opportunities. The evidence is clear: Multilingualism is an asset, not a liability, supporting not only how children learn, connect, and participate in the world, but also adding to their professional pathways in the future.
Anyone who works in education knows the pattern of language loss that begins when a child enters the school system. Over time, heritage languages begin to fade, a loss that is often normalized as an inevitable part of schooling and assimilation. Research, including our own, shows that heritage language attrition follows a predictable pattern when children enter settings where one language dominates socially and institutionally, causing the dominant language to expand at the expense of the other. This is not only a cultural issue; it is foundationally developmental. Sustained exposure to both languages supports more stable language development, while early shifts away from the heritage language can disrupt that balance.
In one of the most linguistically diverse cities, we continue to reproduce monolingualism despite overwhelming evidence of the benefits of multilingualism. New York City’s 2-K program, with its focus on community- and home-based providers, is significant not only for expanding access, but for reshaping how early education is experienced. These programs, and their providers, who are often members of the same community as the families, offer services that are qualitatively different from formal institutional care, offering environments where language, culture, and relationships are not separated from learning, but are its foundation. They are truly a child’s home away from home.
Taken together, the expansion of 2-K home-based care can reshape how language, culture, and education interconnect as a foundation for learning.
In home-based settings, children are more likely to hear and use multiple languages in meaningful, everyday interactions with caregivers and children across ages. Care is organized around relationships and participation, rather than standardized expectations of academic performance. These are not incidental features. They are developmental conditions that support how language is sustained, how children come to belong, and how communities reproduce themselves across generations.
If supported intentionally with professional development opportunities, mentorship, and resources, these community environments could play a critical role in addressing one of the most persistent and overlooked challenges in US education: the systematic erosion of heritage languages beginning in early childhood. One proven way to enhance language development in home-based settings is strengthening the quality of adult-child interactions. In a randomized controlled trial we conducted in linguistically diverse communities, we found that babies in home-based child care vocalized far more when their providers used a program designed to strengthen relationships than did babies in the control group. We also found that the program led to reductions in background noise (such as television and other electronic sounds).
Together, these transformations in the babies’ language environment point to a simple lesson: When caregivers are intentionally supported in building warmer, more responsive interaction patterns, children’s language environments improve in measurable ways. This matters because early language development lays the groundwork for school and lifelong success. Providers can be supported to embed language-rich emotionally responsive interactions across home and care settings, and to facilitate collaboration between families and early learning environments. This potential will not realize itself; it requires deliberate investment.
In addition, home-based settings may address a critical gap in New York’s Early Intervention (EI) system. EI under federal law, is intended to provide support early in a child’s life, before small differences become larger barriers. Each state defines its own criteria. In New York, children with mild delays in a single developmental area, such as communication, often do not qualify for services. The result is inequity: Families with resources turn to private providers, while others must wait until delays become severe enough to meet eligibility thresholds. What is intended as early intervention becomes, in practice, delayed access.
Language can also be supported through family-centered approaches that sustain bilingual exposure when designed from a strengths-based perspective. In our work with Arab American families in New York, this meant creating community-based spaces where parents strengthened their children’s bilingual language use and their own sense of belonging, along with a renewed commitment to bilingualism, and greater confidence in navigating and engaging with public institutions such as libraries and educational spaces. In clinical treatment settings, birth-to-five therapists strive to provide both treatment and supervision in the home languages; it is simply best practice.
As early care becomes more widely available for younger children, providers in these settings are increasingly positioned to notice differences in children’s development, support social participation, and guide families toward resources. This requires ongoing professional support, not only in developmental frameworks, but in approaches that are culturally grounded, transdisciplinary, inclusive, and evidence-based. This means building an interprofessional, holistic, and community-based system of care that brings speech-language pathologists, early childhood educators, mental health professionals, and other healthcare providers to work alongside home-based caregivers and families collaboratively as partners embedded in the same communities.
Evidence from community-based programs shows that when caregivers are supported in building responsive, relational environments, children’s communication skills increase. They grow not through more instruction, but through more meaningful engagement. The question, then, is not only how many seats we create, but what those seats make possible and whether we are willing and able to build the systems needed to sustain them. Home-based providers are already embedded in the communities they serve, often sharing language, culture, and lived experience with families. With intentional and focused support, they will be uniquely positioned to sustain children’s languages, relationships, and development. Without it, expansion risks reproducing the very inequities it seeks to address.
Taken together, the expansion of 2-K home-based care can reshape how language, culture, and education interconnect as a foundation for learning. This direction challenges approaches that pathologize differences and individualize the effects of poverty. It offers a possibility we can realize in New York, where children thrive without giving up who they are, and systems, not families, are accountable.
For Malek, this means entering childcare without being pulled away from his language, home, and identity. Arabic does not stop at the classroom door; it lives in caregivers’ voices and neighborhood interactions. His mother is not measured against narrow expectations of “engagement,” but recognized as a partner in his learning through everyday interactions grounded in their culture. She is not positioned as lacking. Malek does not have to choose between belonging and opportunity because he grows within both.
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It's Too Late, Trump. You Cannot Undo the Multi-Racial, Multi-National Real America
Our nation's true history is one of diversity, even if equity and inclusion have been aspirational. You are the one who should leave. Your sleazy appeals to racial hatred are not welcome here.
Feb 13, 2026
Notice to Donald Trump and his MAGA myrmidons: It’s too late by centuries to turn the United States of American “back” into the ethnically homogenous nation for white people which it never was. And that’s nothing to be disappointed about.
Most Americans aren’t swallowing your so-called jokes depicting African-Americans as apes, your white supremacist lies about Haitians “eating the pets,” your slanders of law-abiding farmworkers as the “worst of the worst,” your creepy wails about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, your demand we exclude refugees who come from what you term “sh**-hole countries.”
Fear and hatred are all you offer, and relief from an imaginary conspiracy of Jews and elites which you claim are plotting to “replace” white Americans with invaders from abroad.
The reality: Americans have always been a polyglot people of multiple races and ethnicities. We did not become a multi-national, multi-ethnic people because of a scheme to open our borders. Rather, our nation and its leaders—through ambition to expand the United States—incorporated other peoples into the American mix from our earliest days. Our true history is one of diversity, even if equity and inclusion have been aspirational.
If the Anglo-Saxon whites who first colonized North America wanted it to be an exclusive homeland for white people, they should not have brought half a million enchained Africans to American shores. By the time the Constitution was adopted, the result was that one in five residents of the new nation were enslaved or free Black people.
If whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for Anglo-Saxon white people, President Thomas Jefferson should not have made the Louisiana Purchase, bringing people of French, Spanish and African ancestry and still more Native American tribal nations into the territory of the United States.
If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, pro-slavery forces should not have launched the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 to seize almost half of what had been Mexico, and incorporate its Mexican population into the enlarged United States.
If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, we shouldn’t have employed tens of thousands of Chinese immigrant workers to build the Transcontinental Railroad, man the mines, and perform the other dangerous and dirty work that helped build the West.
And for that matter, if Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for “pure-bred” white people, they should not have encouraged the immigration of millions of Europeans who, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, weren’t really regarded as “white”: Irish, Italians, Poles and Slavs, eastern European Jews and others—“the wretched refuse of [Europe’s] teeming shores”—to work the mills and mines, the factories and farms of America.
Today desperate, hopeful and hardworking immigrants come from the lands south of our border, from India, from China, from the Dominican Republic. Many are fleeing horrific gang violence, persecution, or the impacts of climate change on their native lands. Undocumented immigrants—the so-called “invaders”—commonly do work native-born Americans won’t do.
Those without documentation provide most of the farm labor force. Trump’s own Labor Department has acknowledged that “agricultural work requires a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.” “Such jobs are still not viewed as viable alternatives for many [U.S.-born] workers.”
Similarly, the labor of undocumented immigrants is critical to the meatpacking industry, food processing, construction, and elder care. Immigrants are not “replacing” American citizens—they are filling needs and struggling for a good life for themselves and their children. That’s what immigrants have always done.
It’s too late, Mr. Trump, for your sleazy appeals to racial hatred. Most Americans know that seeking to degrade others because of their race or ethnicity is deeply wrong—a violation of the values of fairness and decency we struggle to live up to, but seldom spurn entirely.
Our nation and the world have real problems—climate change, shrinking opportunity, inequality and poverty, violence and unnecessary suffering. But it has become clear to more and more Americans that your program of meanness, malice, and spleen are not the solution. It is time for you to get out of the way.
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Provoke and Deny: The Obama Cartoon and Decades of Racialized Governance
The racist imagery that briefly appeared on the official feed is not a rogue error. It is consistent with an administration that has repeatedly deflected harm while avoiding responsibility.
Feb 11, 2026
On a February morning in 2026, the opening days of Black History Month, something unthinkable appeared on the official social media platform of the president of the United States: a video inserting the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama onto cartoon apes, set to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." It flashed at the end of a broader montage promoting 2020 election conspiracies and remained online for roughly 12 hours before deletion.
This was not a careless post. It tapped directly into a long, cruel lineage of racist caricature used to demean and dehumanize Black people. That this imagery came from the nation’s highest office demanded more than embarrassment, it demanded accountability. But what followed was predictable: dismissive deflection, minimization, and no consequences. The White House initially labeled criticism “fake outrage,” claimed it was “just a meme,” and then said it was “erroneously posted by a staffer.” No staffer has been named, and the president publicly declared no one would face repercussions. When pressed on an apology, he said he “didn’t make a mistake” because he had not seen the offensive portion.
Rhetoric cannot erase history. This episode, jarring as it was, is most meaningful as a mirror: It reflects a longstanding pattern of denial, obfuscation, and racialized harm that extends far beyond any single meme or social post.
Long before this video ever appeared, Donald Trump’s public life was intertwined with racial controversy. In 2011, he propelled himself into national headlines by demanding Barack Obama release his birth certificate, questioning whether the first Black president was even born in the United States. He called Obama a “foreign-born fraud,” despite clear evidence to the contrary. This birther campaign wasn’t a slip of judgment; it was a deliberate, sustained effort to delegitimize and diminish the first Black occupant of the White House—a strategy that inflamed racial distrust and energized nativist resentments across the country.
Trump’s repeated insistence that he is “not a racist” functions as a rhetorical shield. It resonates rhetorically but cannot wipe away decades of documented behavior, public statements, and the lived experiences of those harmed by policy and symbolism.
That pattern continued. In 2018, Trump reportedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and several African nations as “shithole countries,” expressing preference for immigrants from Norway. Such language dehumanizes entire nations and the predominantly non-white populations within them, shaping global perception and domestic attitudes alike.
The harm extends into domestic policy and public memory. In the late 1980s, during the Central Park Five case, Trump took out full‑page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers later exonerated by DNA evidence. Even after their innocence was proven, he publicly insisted on their guilt, reinforcing false narratives that fanned racial fear and distrust.
Long before he was in politics, his real estate company was sued by the US Department of Justice for discriminating against Black tenants, steering them away from apartments while offering vacancies to white applicants. The case was settled under a consent decree—but the episode underscores a pattern of exclusion that predates his political career.
Through all of this, denial has been central to the strategy. Trump routinely insists personal friendships with Black Americans prove he cannot be racist. But anecdotes do not outweigh outcomes. Leadership is not measured by denials or self‑serving narratives; it is measured by decisions, actions, and real consequences for communities.
Viewed in this light, the racist imagery that briefly appeared on the official feed is not a rogue error. It is consistent with an administration that has repeatedly deflected harm while avoiding responsibility. When damaging content appears and the response is to blame an unnamed staffer, with no transparency, no accountability, no corrective action, it signals at best a tolerance for racial insensitivity and at worst tacit acceptance of damaging narratives from the nation’s official channels.
Beyond symbolic offenses, the lived realities of millions reflect deeper injury. Immigration enforcement under the administration has subjected families from Latin America, Africa, and Asia to detention, deportation, and family separation, deterring entire communities—disproportionately people of color—from seeking healthcare, education, and legal protections. Threats to Medicare jeopardize access to care for Black, Latino, and Indigenous seniors already navigating health disparities, compounding generational inequities. Efforts to slash support for public education disproportionately affect students in underfunded schools—disproportionately Black, Latino, and Indigenous—by stripping Title I funding, free lunch programs, after‑school initiatives, and protections against discriminatory practices. Proposals to restrict the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) leave hundreds of thousands, again disproportionately people of color, struggling with food insecurity and impossible choices between rent, medicine, and nourishment.
These threads are not separate. Families impacted by immigration enforcement often rely on SNAP or local schools, all parts of a social fabric that, when weakened, frays most quickly at its most vulnerable edges.
Representation at the top matters, too. In the second Trump administration, only a handful of Black officials hold top leadership roles, including Scott Turner as Housing and Urban Development secretary and Lynne Patton in White House outreach. Most high‑level offices remain overwhelmingly white, signaling whose voices shape policy and whose perspectives are absent from critical debates.
Language and civic rituals shape how a nation understands justice, belonging, and whose histories are honored. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is more than ceremony; it is a moral touchstone. Yet this year, the administration failed to recognize the holiday officially and removed it from the federal list of free pass days in national parks, a symbolic demotion that strips public access and diminishes public commemoration. Such action may seem bureaucratic, but it is telling: When national institutions downgrade the public recognition of a civil rights icon while championing narratives that demean Black leadership, the message is clear.
Trump’s repeated insistence that he is “not a racist” functions as a rhetorical shield. It resonates rhetorically but cannot wipe away decades of documented behavior, public statements, and the lived experiences of those harmed by policy and symbolism. True leadership is not measured by denials but by accountability and moral clarity.
The Obama video, the birther attacks, the attempts to delegitimize Black leadership, the Central Park Five advertisements, the housing discrimination lawsuit, and the “shithole country” comments are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern in which racialized harm is consistently dismissed, deflected, or minimized, even as policies continue to disproportionately affect communities of color.
Moral leadership demands more than words. It demands recognition of harm, centering those most affected in decision‑making, and ensuring that power and opportunity are equitably shared. On these measures, the administration’s pattern of deflection, denial, and exclusion is a failure, one that cannot be concealed behind memes, conspiracy theories, or personal relationships. For a nation still wrestling with the legacy of race, the cost of inaction is lived, generational, and real.
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What Holiday Magic Teaches Us About Resisting Authoritarianism
This holiday season, let us embrace the art of ambiguity as a form of resistance.
Dec 25, 2025
As Donald Trump declares in his recent address that he has achieved "more than anyone could have imagined" with "zero illegal aliens" allowed into the country and "100 percent of all jobs" going to American-born citizens, I'm thinking about what my Hungarian mother, my édi, taught me about surviving authoritarianism: the radical necessity of making room for what we cannot fully explain or control.
I'm an academic. I derive great comfort from empirical evidence and investigating every question with a critical, researcher's eye. I teach my students to do the same. I want them to confidently read the world with care and curiosity. This is more important than ever. As a group of students in my research methods class discovered this semester, 54% of adults in the U.S. read below a sixth-grade level. Authoritarians depend on this. They depend on a population that cannot parse complexity, that craves simple answers to complicated questions, that mistakes certainty for strength. In this recent ostensibly economic address, Trump declared he has "settled eight wars in 10 months" and brought "for the first time in 3,000 years peace to the Middle East." No nuance. No acknowledgment of ongoing negotiations or fragile ceasefires. Just absolute, unquestionable victory. This is the language of someone who cannot tolerate ambiguity, everything must be either 'worst ever' or 'best ever,' with no room for the messy reality in between.
I teach at CUNY, the largest urban university in the United States, which makes me one of the luckiest people alive. My students are remarkable worldbuilders, often the first in their families to earn degrees. Much like I experienced as an immigrant navigating college, they have no one opening doors for them, no family footsteps to guide their decision-making. They are celebrations of all their ancestors, all their family members and their legacies. When we get to be together, it is sacred.
While I'm deeply invested in helping refine their critical thinking brilliance and their literacy of complex information, these are essential democratic tools after all, I also focus on something autocrats fear even more: our tolerance for ambiguity. This isn't new wisdom. Simone de Beauvoir argued seventy years ago that embracing uncertainty is an ethical necessity, that rigid certainty is a form of bad faith. But knowing this intellectually isn't enough. We must practice it, build the muscle of sitting with what we cannot control. We aren't necessarily born with a tolerance for ambiguity, no, we have to develop it.
This is what ordinary people do when they refuse authoritarian thinking: they risk themselves for something beyond certainty, for the magic of collective care, for keeping possibility alive in impossible circumstances.
Authoritarianism offers the seductive comfort of certainty. It promises that complex problems have simple solutions, that there are clear enemies and obvious heroes, that strength means never wavering or admitting uncertainty. It means launching missiles at boats in international waters and, when survivors cling to debris, firing again and then claiming moral clarity where there is only extrajudicial killing. But meaningful civic engagement requires the opposite. Meaningful civic engagement requires the capacity to sit with complex questions, to accept unknowns, to trust processes we cannot fully control.
In my research methods course, I ask students to create "visual citations" to introduce themselves. For this assignment they are invited to use any medium their imaginations can conjure. When these are due, we create a gallery around the classroom and marvel at our luck to build community with each person. Students have brought in playlists, five items of clothing representing their life journeys, stunning collages, paintings, sculptures. One created an entire puzzle of her family's migration story. As we complete our visual analysis, we ask: What gifts does our community bring? That is where we root ourselves, in the joys uncovered through a deceptively ambiguous and uncertain process.
But to reach this revelation, we first have to get past the discomfort of the unfamiliar. Students sometimes want to resist. Who can blame them? Why can't I just give them an exam to cram for, definitions to memorize? But then, most of the time, the classroom comes to trust me. I always explain my pedagogical reasons. And these risks pay off tremendously. We come to see each other as complex, dynamic, wonderful human beings. We come to see ourselves as capable of things we could not have imagined.
I developed a high tolerance for ambiguity early, as a child in Ceaușescu's Romania. My father escaped before I could hold onto memories of him. My childhood was my single mother and my two siblings. But Christmas—wow, my mom made Christmas magical!
In our region, it's not Santa who comes on Christmas. On St. Nicholas Day early in the month, he leaves goodies (and handwritten notes giving tips about how we can behave in the coming year—Santa is such a critic) in our boots. On Christmas, angels arrive and bring surprises and the Christmas tree. We lived on the fifth floor of a communist tenement, and somehow my mom arranged for angels to arrive once while we were home. We had no other explanation. The angels must have flown in through the balcony door and left the same way. We knew that the angels were, in fact, real. Peering through the crack at the bottom of the door, we could see black boots moving in the living room.
Meaningful civic engagement requires the capacity to sit with complex questions, to accept unknowns, to trust processes we cannot fully control.
Decades later, on a rare visit to my village, I learned that our neighbor had been in cahoots with my mom that year and literally risked his life climbing over from his balcony to ours, to make sure we would not give up on the magic of Christmas. Angels do wear black boots, but some climb instead of fly.
This is what ordinary people do when they refuse authoritarian thinking: they risk themselves for something beyond certainty, for the magic of collective care, for keeping possibility alive in impossible circumstances.
We live in a complex world. How lucky we are to share it with people who hold different perspectives, different experiences, different skills from us. To fully appreciate the gift of diversity, we have to tolerate ambiguity.
As the Trump administration moves to consolidate power through the false comfort of absolute certainty—declaring "our border is secure, inflation has stopped, wages are up, prices are down," a world with no room for the millions of Americans whose lived reality tells a different story—we must practice the opposite. We must hold space for what we cannot fully explain: for the neighbor who climbs across balconies in the dark, for the angels who somehow bring trees to the fifth floor, for the students whose brilliance catches us by surprise, for neighbors organizing to protect community members from ICE raids, for the ways collective care outsmarts surveillance states.
This holiday season, let us embrace the art of ambiguity as a resistance to authoritarianism. Let us choose the discomfort of complexity over the seductive ease of autocratic certainty. Let us trust in processes we cannot fully control—like democratic deliberation, like community care, like the slow work of building understanding across difference.
That's how my mom taught me to survive authoritarianism with my soul intact. We did not match the rigid certainty of Ceaușescu's policies. Instead we kept alive our capacity for wonder, for trust in what we cannot see, for believing that angels wear black boots and fly through balcony doors.
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No, Diversity Is Not the Cause of Violence
The true problem lies elsewhere, such as in economic and power interests, the old drivers of wars and genocides.
Dec 16, 2025
On December 13, 2025, a man with a gun killed two students in a classroom at Brown University and left half a dozen seriously injured. This tragedy did not make headlines around the world because shootings are a tradition in the United States. According to various statistics, for a century (it would be necessary to add the colonization of centuries before, carried out by religious fanatics against Indians, Blacks, and Mexicans), mass murderers have tended to be supporters of the supremacist right, but it is they who blame diversity for all the ills of their societies. Fear is big business.
This massacre took a back seat when, the following day, 11 people were killed in Sydney, Australia. The victims were members of a Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah. Since the ban on semi-automatic rifles and strict regulation of firearms in 1996, massacres in Australia are a rarity.
Immediately, social media was flooded with explanations about the danger of Islam to the world, even when it was revealed that the man who stopped and disarmed one of the two attackers in the midst of the massacre was a 43-year-old Muslim, father of two children, who was shot twice. Benjamin Netanyahu will probably honor him with the Israel Prize in Human Values and Civil Heroism.
A couple of hours later, the richest Argentine in the world and resident of Uruguay, Marcos Galperin, who presents himself as the “founder and executive chairman of Mercado Libre” and Konex Prize winner, commented on the massacre with the same prejudice that the killers surely share: “Welcome to the new multicultural and diverse Australia.”
The now demonized multiculturalism is as old as the domestication of fire.
Could it be that the problem perceived by those who are against diversity is skin color? Why are non-Caucasians always the problem? When, for centuries, white people devoted themselves to assaulting, destroying, and massacring the rest of the world, they were only bringing civilization to those “shithole countries,” to use President Donald Trump's language to refer to the countries of the South. “Why do we accept people from these shithole countries, like Somalia, and not accept people from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark?” Perhaps because, to them, we are the shithole country.
The common factor is always the same: The problem is not cultural diversity, but something as superficial as skin color. When they find out that the native British and Belgians were black-skinned people, their blood sugar rises.
The now demonized multiculturalism is as old as the domestication of fire. There was no trade, let alone free trade (an ancient activity until it was destroyed by capitalism), without cultural, linguistic, religious, and technological exchange. From the 10th century until the beginning of the European slave trade, the Kingdom of Nri achieved almost 1,000 years of coexistence based on the principles of “peace, truth, and harmony.” The Nri culture, located in what is now Nigeria, shared with the Ubuntu philosophy of the southern continent its collective conception of the individual and its conception of peace and social harmony as higher goals. Its communal ownership of land and production, and its intense trade with other nations as far away as Egypt, ended with the arrival of Europeans and the novel slave trade based on skin color.
The same was true of Native American peoples. In most Indigenous cultures, foreigners who were adopted not only ended up integrating into the new society, but also tended to occupy a place of great respect in the social pyramid. The same cannot be said of the deeply racist societies of the revered Free World (“the free race,” white)―unless we are talking about sepoy soldiers.
In the Great Peace League of North America, the Iroquois adopted foreigners from all cultures and languages, including Europeans, who often did not want to return to “civilization.” Native diversity also included members of different genders (men and women “of two spirits”). These were not naive savages. For centuries, they defeated European armies armed with advanced technology, not because of their arrows but because of their superior social organization. They even expanded throughout the Ohio River basin in response to attacks by British and French armies. It was not for nothing that the natives mocked the white man's concept of freedom: “We are free,” they said. “We are not desperate to be rich, nor do we obey the orders of our leaders when they do not convince us. You submit to anything: kings, captains, priests...”
We could continue with other cultures, such as the Arab Empire, which lasted several centuries. Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted, prospered, and multiplied for centuries in one of the most outstanding civilizations in science, rational analysis, and technology.
Of course, if we look at the entire history of humanity, we will always find plenty of examples of violence, massacres, and genocide. No one can say that in these centuries of coexistence there were no conflicts, wars, and brutalities, because that is a chronic ailment of the human species. But if we compare realities, we can say that our contemporary world, which prides itself on being advanced and civilized, has stood out for its exceptional brutality. Suffice it to mention the world wars, the atomic bombs, or the imperial dictatorships imposed by the “sacrificed white man” (Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt) on the rest of humanity. Always victimizing themselves for their own crimes. As Ukrainian Golda Meir said, “We can never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children.”
Although we cannot say that there are welcome forms of hatred, we can say that there is no single type of hatred. Slaves hated their masters for what they did, and masters hated their slaves for what they were. It is one thing to hate for what one is and another to hate for what one does.
If there is a problem with the ancient culture and morality of diversity and tolerance, it is that racists who promote civil and imperial violence are protected by the law. In fact, we reward them. Otherwise, it would be impossible to understand why the sect of global billionaires is racist, sexist, and hates the poor, whom they divide and parasitize every day.
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Bill Moyers Exemplified Public TV at Its Best
From his reporting on issues like the Iran-Contra scandal to his critique of corporate media, Moyers worked to hold the powerful to account and provide a voice for the unheard.
Jul 03, 2025
Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. His career began as a close aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as LBJ’s de facto chief of staff and then his press secretary, but Moyers spent most of his life in journalism. After the Johnson administration, he was briefly publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, which won two Pulitzers under his tenure before he was forced out for being too left (Extra!, 1–2/96).
Most of Moyers’ journalism, however, appeared on public television, an institution he helped launch as a member of the 1967 Carnegie Commission, which called for public TV to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”
While public TV as a whole has often failed to live up to those ideas, Moyers exemplified them.
Consistently Critical
Moyers was a consistently critical voice on PBS. In 1987, his PBS special “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis” offered a searing examination of the Iran-Contra scandal; he followed that up with an even deeper dive into the story three years later for “Frontline” with “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Moyers’ 2007 documentary Buying the War, aired four years into the Iraq War, offered a critique of media failures in the run-up to war that was rarely heard in corporate media.
His independence made him a thorn in PBS‘ side. Robert Parry (FAIR.org, 9/13/11) explained:
When I was working at PBS “Frontline” in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs—such as a show denouncing Cuba’s Fidel Castro—to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn’t like, such as Bill Moyers’ analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal.
In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as “balance” to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their “objectivity” and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.
When Moyers hosted the news program “Now” (2002-04), the right complained—and PBS addressed the complaints by cutting the hour-long show to 30 minutes, while adding three right-wing programs: “Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered”; a show by conservative commentator Michael Medved; and the “Journal Editorial Report,“” featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page (FAIR.org, 9/17/04).
Moyers was already heading out the door at “Now,” passing the torch to co-host David Brancaccio, who largely continued its hard-hitting tradition. Moyers returned to PBS in 2007 with a revival of his 1970s public affairs show, “Bill Moyers Journal.” When he retired that show in 2010, PBS also canceled “Now.” Moyers’ brand of independent journalism has been in short supply on PBS ever since.
Moyers diagnosed the problem in an appearance on Democracy Now! (6/8/11):
Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you’re looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don’t want reported. And today, only… a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.
‘Real Change Comes From Outside the Consensus’
Moyers shared FAIR’s critique of corporate media. On “Tavis Smiley” (5/13/11), he spoke about the elite bias in the media:
Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.
Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology—two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job—those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.
Jeff Cohen, FAIR’s founder, remembered Moyers’ impact on FAIR:
He was very supportive of FAIR from day one, and always offered encouragement to our staff. He was especially supportive of our studies of who gets to speak on PBS and NPR, and who doesn’t. He helped FAIR find funding for quarter-page advertorials on The New York Times op-ed page, which was then crucial and well-read media real estate, on various issues of corporate media bias or censorship. And he helped us find funding as well for a full-page ad in USA Today, exposing the distortions and lies of Rush Limbaugh.
Already some in corporate media are trying to push Moyers’ dissenting voice to the shadows. The New York Times (6/26/25), in a lengthy obituary devoted mostly to Moyers’ time working with LBJ, found no room to mention Moyers’ Iran-Contra work, or his repeated clashes with and criticisms of PBS. It did, however, find space to quote far-right website FrontPageMag.com, which in 2004 called Moyers a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”
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How to Use 197 Forbidden 'Woke' Words and Still Get a Grant From the Trump-Musk Government
A grant proposal concerning reparations for the descendants of slave owners, submitted in good faith to Elon Musk during this cruel and unusual time of oppressive wokeness.
Mar 27, 2025
Dear Elon,
On behalf of the Diversified Organization of Grant Enablers, (the original DOGE), thank you for ordering the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to flag proposals that contain certain oppressive “woke” words you don’t like. We’re not wild about them either.
Forbes leaked the list of the 197 terms, rendered here in bold italics. (And kudos, dear sir, for not banning George Carlin’s seven dirty words!)
BTW, the biased media is inflating the number of forbidden words, trying to make you look bad. For example, it counts as individual terms diverse, diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse community, diverse group, diverse groups, diversified, diversify, diversifying, and diversity. Fake news, is it not?
But we have a suggestion. Rather than ban them, giving the liberals something easy to roast you with, why not put them to work in an anti-woke context? That’s what our professional team of DOGE grant writers has done in a model culturally appropriate proposal. You will love it, even though it uses just about all the barred terms. (Sorry, we failed to squeeze in people + uterus.)
We don’t want to brag, but this can’t-miss proposal will shake up the lunatic left. You will want to immediately fund it, even while chain-sawing so many others into sawdust. And when you spread the word on X, your popularity with anti-woke key groups is going to skyrocket! Even Steve Bannon will snuggle up to you.
Thanks for purifying our thoughts and bringing your antiracist Afrikaner sensibility to our great nation.
Proposal For Reparations for the Descendants of Slave Owners (DSO)
Britain abolished slavery in 1833 and provided former slave owners 20 million British pounds (the equivalent today of $22.1 billion US dollars) as compensation. Racial justice demands a similar response from the U.S. federal government for the descendants of U.S. slave owners.
In South Africa today, oppressed white farmers face land confiscation without compensation from its BIPOC government. Slave owners in the U.S. were victims of a similar injustice after the Civil War, punished for their identity. Without reparations, which have been too long denied, their descendants are victimized again generation after generation.
To promote a truly inclusive society based on equity, equality, and diversity for all, we must recognize and celebrate our cultural differences. While we are a nation of immigrants, we also are a nation of slaveowners!
For too long implicit bias and hate speech have been used against those, due to no fault of their own, who were born into slave-owning families. These key populations, labeled DSO here, should be considered at risk minorities. They helped create our national identity and contributed significantly to our cultural heritage. Racism in America would have little meaning without them.
Our proposal is a multicultural exploration of race and ethnicity among the slave-owning class, and their extended contact with indigenous communities and the Hispanic minority along the Gulf of Mexico. These marginalized non-white groups, including males and females, also owned slaves and suffered losses due to emancipation.
We must put aside our stereotypes about the plantation class. This underappreciated and undervalued population is difficult to analyze due to our own unconscious bias against all aspects of slavery. The DSO have lost their voice and its once fearsome power, since some ancestors of slaveowners are burdened by a crippling sense of guilt and so are underrepresented in modern political discourse.
To advocate for reparations for DSO members is not to whitewash their faults. Slave-owners promoted systemic racism, segregation, and white privilege— even for white non-slave-owners— but we should acknowledge their genuine sense of belonging formed though the intersectionality of sociocultural and socioeconomic factors in plantation society.
Even though white women were systematically placed on a pedestal, they were never excluded from institutional slave-owning power. They adored their narrow gender identity. These women of high status were never marginalized by aggressive feminists. They were totally at ease with being biologically female and with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Also, we can find no transgender and transexual members of slave-owning society and the DSO. Women did not run domestic plantation life in order to overcome disparities or spew meaningless pronouns in polite society. This wholesome tradition has been carried on by the DSO and provides another reason for just compensation.
A key, but seldom discussed factor, is the gender-based violence suffered at the hands of marauding Yankee soldiers. The DSO may deserve additional compensation for the trauma suffered as well as any resulting mental disabilities of their forebearers.
Meanwhile, slave-owning men were real men, biologically males with no wanton legacy of men having sex with men (MSM). And please forgive us for a personal judgement: These god-fearing slaveowners left their descendants with not the faintest expressions of non-binary awareness, thank goodness.
Because of the uncompensated destruction of the slave-holding structures, we regret to report that more than a few white plantation women became commercial sex workers in order to survive the marauding armies. The anguish and mental health problems facing white plantation prostitutes should be considered when awarding reparations. While it is too late to do something for them, our unconscious bias about sex should not distract us from a path of justice for their descendants.
Another important thread connects the slave owners to the climate crisis they and their descendants experienced. Monocrops repeatedly planted to raise cash in trade depleted the soil on Southern farms, creating pollution in their drinking water and a more generally degraded environmental quality. Westward expansion of slavery took more and more land from Native American tribes. Without climate science to inform them, effective solutions were missed and succeeding generations paid the price. We compensate farmers today for crop failures and tariff losses, why not do the same for the DSO including tribal DSO?
We hope that grant reviewers will look beyond their built-in anti-slaveowner confirmation bias, as well as their preconceived notions about race and ethnicity. It’s time to hone our cultural sensitivity and embrace a true cultural diversity, one that includes both descendants of slaves and slave owners. Our all-inclusive survey will make plain the biases we hold against this DSO class.
Since the Civil War, polarization has led to oppression and vilification of our great but marginalized plantation heritage. This injustice can only be rectified by fair and equitable compensation for the undervalued and underserved, whose relatives had their Black human capital stripped from them.
Our project asks only that we adjust our orientation and increase the diversity of those considered the victims of slavery. We must foster inclusiveness, devising just and equitable compensation programs for all descendants of slavery, including the DSO.
Social justice requires that we overcome our own prejudices and promote diversity of thought. By doing so, we all should recognize that slave-owning descendants too should be considered among our most vulnerable populations, entitled to equal opportunities when reparations are considered.
Now is the time to rectify the historical inequity faced by the DSO.
Now is the time to enhance the diversity of reparations recipients and the way they are viewed.
Now is the time to fund our bold proposal which strives, like no other, to bring community equity to all our people.
Cc: Rober Kennedy Jr., J.D. Vance, and the descendants of Robert E. Lee
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'Chaos and Fear' at CDC Amid Order to Retract Journal Articles to Purge 'Forbidden Terms'
"How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named," one journal editor said.
Feb 02, 2025
Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been ordered to pull any articles under consideration for publication in medical or scientific journals so that they can be checked for certain "forbidden terms" including gender, transgender, and LGBT.
The order was sent in an email to CDC division heads on Friday by the agency's chief science officer, a federal official told Reuters on Sunday. Inside Medicine broke the news on Saturday and provided a screenshot of the full list of terms that needed to be scrubbed.
"It sounds incredible that this is compatible with the First Amendment. A constitutional right has been canceled," Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health, told Reuters. "How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named."
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV."
The order is an attempt to ensure that CDC is in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order mandating that the U.S. government only recognize two sexes: male and female. The papers will be withdrawn so that a Trump appointee can review them.
The "forbidden terms" CDC employees are supposed to avoid are, in full: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female, according to Inside Medicine.
The order covers both papers under consideration and those accepted but not published. According to Reuters, if a CDC employee worked on a paper with nongovernmental scientists but did not initiate it, they have been asked to remove their names.
The new order is separate from a demand two days into the administration that government health agencies including CDC freeze all communications with the public. It follows reports on Friday that CDC webpages and datasets involving HIV, the LGBTQ community, youth health, and other topics were no longer accessible as the agency attempts to comply with the Trump executive order on transgender identity and another on banning government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
"It is Orwellian, it really is," Steven Woolf, director emeritus and senior adviser at Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Society and Health,
In response to the purges, scientists, science journalists, and public health advocates have worked to preserve the datasets, with everything on the CDC website as of January 27, 2024 preserved at ACASignups.net and downloaded data sets also available on Jessica Valenti's Substack Abortion, Every Day.
"Censoring data on ideological grounds is wrong. It is unscientific, and it is designed to eliminate opposition and erase dissidents," virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was involved with the data preservation efforts, wrote on social media.
The journal article retraction order has created uncertainty and confusion at the agency, Inside Medicine reported:
How many manuscripts are affected is unclear, but it could be many. Most manuscripts include simple demographic information about the populations or patients studied, which typically includes gender (and which is frequently used interchangeably with sex). That means just about any major study would fall under the censorship regime of the new policy, including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else, let alone anything that the administration considers to be "woke ideology."
Meanwhile, chaos and fear are already guiding decisions. While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump's executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that. Do papers that describe disparities in health outcomes fall into "woke ideology" or not? Nobody knows, and everyone is scared that they'll be fired. This is leading to what Germans call "vorauseilender Gehorsam," or "preemptive obedience," as one non-CDC scientist commented.
There are also concerns that censoring such a broad list of terms would have unintended consequences for public health.
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV. I certainly hope this is not the intent of these orders," Carl Schmid, the executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, told Reuters.
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