In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball reckons with a white supremacist ancestor. Try explaining that to the students.
Life of a Klansman: A Family History of White Supremacy is the latest book by Edward Ball, whose award-winning 1998 book Slaves in the Family traces the histories of people enslaved by Ball's own ancestors. In Klansman, Ball tells the story of a racist great-grandfather who joined the Ku Klux Klan.
The New York Times hailed it
as "a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just
about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too
present in our society today," and the anti-racism scholar Ibram X.
Kendi participated in a virtual discussion about it with Ball. Tulane University was slated to host another such event, featuring Ball and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, an assistant professor of geography and African American studies.
That
event was supposed to take place tonight, but the university opted to
postpone it following blinkered outrage from students who insisted that
the event was "not only inappropriate but violent towards the experience
of Black people in the Tulane community and our country." Other members
of the Tulane community called it "harmful and offensive," and demanded
its cancellation. Still others said the university should apologize and
take action against whoever approved the event. (I verified that the
people who made these kinds of comments were Tulane students, graduates,
and employees. I chose not to name most of them in order to prevent
individual harassment, though I did identify two student government
officials who affixed their names to an appalling demand for
censorship.).......To Read More...
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