The following essay is based on a talk that Noel Ignatiev delivered in March 2004 at the Massachusetts College of Arts. Despite being nearly 20 years old, this text is nonetheless absolutely relevant because it provides a historical context for understanding Israel’s 75 year occupation of Palestine, one that is missing from most mainstream media […]
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Iowa Bluffs
“Indeed, we are all implicated in Iowa.” –Heather Anne Swanson, “The Banality of the Anthropocene” Crossing the Mississippi River from Illinois into Iowa by car is an almost effortless glide, eliding entirely the forceful pull of the Great River and the centuries of violence greater still that harnessed its bucking current into an engine of […]
How Did I Get Here?, part 3: Iowa City Activism in the 1970s
The following is the third in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” After leaving graduate school in 1966, I entered what I have called my first academic career. It would only last until 1974. Between 1970 and 1974, I was a faculty member at […]
How Did I Get Here?, part 2: Rudy
The following is the second in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” Prior to going away to college, my interaction with Black people had been limited conversations with a Black cleaning woman named Louise. I loved her and would go down the basement of […]
How Did I Get Here?, part 1: On My Futile Attempt to Become a High School Athlete
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece that explores how a red, white and blue diaper baby, raised by conservative Republican parents in a largely conservative Republican and all white suburb in a conservative religious tradition grew up to become first, a social justice activist and eventually a Marxist Humanist revolutionary. The longer […]
A Rainy Night in Georgia
In 1977, I was a signaler (radio operator) in the South African Army, the infantry. I was stationed in a camp called Mpacha, which was a few hundred yards from the border of Zambia in the Caprivi Strip of northern Namibia. When we signalmen weren’t on patrol, we had shifts in the Mpacha base underground […]