As y’all get ready for the midterm, here are a couple of short pieces I’ve been meaning to share that show the ongoing relevance of some of the early-to-mid twentieth-century texts we’ve been reading. First is a piece from the New York Review of Books that reviews Korean-American author Wesley Yang’s recent collection of essays, The Souls of Yellow Folk. As you’ll see, it riffs on Du Bois’s idea of “double consciousness” from the perspective of 21st century Asian American life, thinking about many of the same issues we’ve been talking about around the specular construction of race (i.e,. how race is “produced” through socially constructed ways of looking).

Second is an article from the philosopher George Yancey, who often writes about race for the New York Times. We’ll be reading his analysis of The Bluest Eye in a bit. This piece brilliantly reframes the debate about “blackface” that’s resurfaced with great urgency around the revelations that, well, the entire white political leadership of Virginia spent all of college and graduate school wearing black shoe polish. Rather than focus on the obvious fact that these acts distort blackness, Yancy moves upstream and asks why white people, or maybe better, whiteness itself depends on blackface even while disavowing this dependence.