Blog / Our America

PETP, or, Unintended Consequences

November 17, 2023 - By Jim Hicks

(Illustration by Rose M. Spielman; Psychology: OpenStax, p. 519, Fig 14.22

“There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.”

Since the October War on Gaza began, I’m told, we’ve been killing a thousand children a week.

For an instant, when Joe Biden said, don’t repeat our mistakes, there was a flash, a glimmer, a mirage maybe, but there was something. After all, sometimes we do learn, sometimes we know the history, sometimes we’re...

Open Statement in Solidarity with Palestine

November 10, 2023 - By Woman Life Freedom

Jin, Jiyan, Azadî as in Free Palestine

We, the undersigned, who have been pleading for Jin Jiyan Azadî in the last year, demand an end to genocide, call for immediate ceasefire, and express our solidarity with the Palestinian people and their liberation struggle.

As we witness genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli state’s occupying forces against Palestinians, overwhelmingly the people of Gaza, as well as the residents of the West Bank, we are filled with anger, pain and devastation. We are deeply troubled by the racist, dehumanising language and hate speech casually broadcasted by the Western media, which has complicitly facilitated the ongoing violence. Sitting in an unspeakable grief for the countless lives and voices lost during this tragic...

Unwavering Clarity of Purpose

October 13, 2023 - By Mary Bombardier

(Juanita Morrow Nelson. Photo by Ed Hedemann, 2010)

I've been thinking of Juanita Nelson lately. What would she think of the state of the world right now, our relationships to the earth, to one another. What would she say about how we are living?

Juanita was one of the few people I’ve met in my life who truly lived her values. Fill in the latest buzzword for community engagement and social justice work—relational, transformational, liberatory—she embodied it. She embodied these principles with ease because they were part of everything she did. And she did it without the ego and arrogance that can often consume those of us who strive to be authentically part of social justice movements.

Over the past thirty years, I have worked at the intersection...

Open Letter to President Magill

September 28, 2023 - By Anna Botta and Jim Hicks

26 September 2023

Dear President M. Elizabeth Magill:

My wife Anna Botta and I have many wonderful memories from our days as graduate students in Comparative Literature at Penn in the late eighties and early nineties. One in particular will serve to frame and reflect our complex experience this past weekend, when we attended the Palestine Writes literary festival in Irvine Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

As you will see, our feelings—of both pride and indignation—during and following the festival are not easy to summarize; that may indeed be the reason our thoughts turned to a light-hearted essay that a certain saintly scholar once wrote to encapsulate his own sense of what academic conferences are all about. Gerry Prince—who was...

Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic

September 25, 2023 - By Earl Douglas, Jr. and Darrell M. McNeill

(Photo: from the BRC photo gallery, “30 Years of Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic”)

The Black Rock Coalition emphatically and wholeheartedly condemns Jann Wenner’s thoughtless misogynistic and racist statements in the New York Times regarding women and Black artists. While his comments were beyond reprehensible, they are no major revelation to Black artists who’ve struggled with the White rock establishment from Day One: Wenner only confirmed and re-emphasized how mass media outlets have—and continue to...