Photo Clarence H. White

This Sunday’s sex is all about the idea of ethnicity. Did you know that the state of Arizona is now banning the field of ethnic studies? These attempts to keep migrants out or, in case they’ve got in, as unnoticeable as possible, are so crude, so infantile, so little comprehending of the complexities of culture and desire.

Borderlanders: What Jews Know about Immigration by Debbie Nathan

Houston, my hometown, had many Mexican Americans when I was young but few Jewish Americans. As a member of the second group—darkish skinned, dark haired, brown-eyed–living among blonde, blue-eyed Baptists and Methodists, I was frequently asked, “Honey, what are you?” by my friends’ parents. . .

Before I was white by William Easterly

Nell Irvin Painter is an African-American historian at Princeton. I just finished her fascinating History of White People. The big story is what a slippery category “White” is, and how many today considered “White” used not to be. My German and Scots-Irish ancestors, some of whom probably arrived as indentured servants (i.e. temporary slaves), were called “guano” (birdsh*t) by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1851. Emerson of course placed Anglo-Saxon English at the top of the racial hierarchy.

What’s Left of Queer? Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World by Yasmin Nair

The rhetoric of “family reunification” erases the labor issues that are integral to how families work within their adopted neighborhoods and cities. By rendering the family in affective terms, we’re allowed to forget that neoliberalism increasingly deploys entire families as labor. Take, for instance, the popular mythology of immigrant-run family stores that help to revitalize neighborhoods. In fact, these, like the low-paid immigrants who live in the surrounding area, help to prepare neighborhoods for gentrification. Eventually, the better-off immigrants might join the ranks of the gentrifiers, while the rest are pushed further into the outskirts of the city, bused in for construction work in “better” neighborhoods.

How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy’s Burqa Ban by Ruth Harris

Militant secularism has a long, troubled history in France, from paranoia over nun’s wimples to the Dreyfusard anti-Jesuit campaigns. Where will it end?