Myriam Gurba responds to David Brooks’s recent op-ed against “teacher resistance” to opening schools, in which he invoked the spirit of Black Lives Matter, calling on readers to march in the streets in support of getting “Black and brown children back safely into schools right now.” Gurba, an author and educator whose parents were both teachers, points out that Brooks does not have similar expertise. Gurba writes, “Capitalism requires inequality, suffering and death and by re-warehousing Black and Brown students on shoddy campuses, places where COVID-19 is likely to spread, the acceptable cost to “re-openers” comes into focus. Racial capitalism, which is all of capitalism, relies on those of us deemed “not white” to carry those deemed white and if we die in the process, we needn’t worry.”
In the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad, calling it “among the most obsessive food novels yet written.” Garner is not a fan, but acknowledges that the author “has earned the right to write a fluky novel without shaking our respect.”
At Vulture, Emily Gould reviews Appearances, a metafictional podcast by Sharon Mashihi: “It was the first time I had ever felt as transported by audio as I have been by reading—felt almost inside another person’s consciousness.”
The Hill reports that eighty journalists have been arrested in Russia in connection with the protests of Alexei Navalny’s detention.
In The Guardian, Moira Donegan discusses Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent statement denouncing her Republican colleagues’ unrepentant stance on the Capitol attack. In an Instagram Live stream broadcast last night, the congresswoman also disclosed how her experience as a survivor of sexual assault informs her view of denial tactics. “To recognize a pattern is not the same thing as drawing an equivalence,” Donegan writes, “and AOC is correct in her observation that the rhetorical strategies used by Republicans – to deny their own wrongdoing, attack the victims seeking accountability, and to pretend that the true wrongdoing has been committed against them – are the same strategies deployed by other tyrants, be they political or domestic, seeking to uphold other unjust and dangerous systems of power.”
