Americans must constantly and critically question the breezy, arrogant belief that the United States is a most perfect union of freedom, democracy, and openness. But the notion that the US is not the best of countries but the worst is equally distorted and in its way just as toxic and conceited.
NEW YORK – Recently, the US podcaster-provocateur Joe Rogan made headlines by saying that, given America’s current cultural trajectory, straight white men will eventually no longer be “allowed to go outside.” On the other hand, the University of North Carolina denied tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning leader of the New York Times’s influential, and not uncontroversial, 1619 Project about America’s history of slavery. In another twist, the historically black Howard University disbanded its classics department, a decision that the Harvard philosopher Cornel West described as “a spiritual catastrophe.”
NEW YORK – Recently, the US podcaster-provocateur Joe Rogan made headlines by saying that, given America’s current cultural trajectory, straight white men will eventually no longer be “allowed to go outside.” On the other hand, the University of North Carolina denied tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning leader of the New York Times’s influential, and not uncontroversial, 1619 Project about America’s history of slavery. In another twist, the historically black Howard University disbanded its classics department, a decision that the Harvard philosopher Cornel West described as “a spiritual catastrophe.”