Tag Archives: The Atlantic

June 25, 2012, 6:20 pm

Does Anyone Really Need to Have It All?

By now everyone and their mother is discussing Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article for the Atlantic claiming that women can’t really have it all: a high-powered career and a happy home life. Slaughter would know. A law professor and then dean at Princeton who got a great gig being the director of policy planning at the State Department, she also had a husband willing to keep the home fires burning. In other words, by Slaughter’s own admission, she had all the privileges in the world and still couldn’t find a way to balance career with being what she assumed would be “good parenting.” Slaughter admits that

such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist…

March 10, 2012, 10:24 am

Kony 2012, My Children, and Post-Colonial Sentimentality

By Laurie Essig

Okay, I’ll admit it. I am happily participating in post-colonial sentimentality and white man as savior fantasies in order to support what I believe is the political awakening of my children. I get that it’s wrong, but I am also fairly certain it is far more complicated than that. I am talking, of course, of the Kony 2012 Campaign.

If you haven’t seen it, click on it. But you probably have seen it. The video got 56 Million views after just four days on Youtube. It is, of course, a very complicated text. In it, human rights activist Jason Russell tells a highly simplified version of Lords Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and its villainous leader Joseph Kony.

Now there are certain facts that nearly everyone can agree upon. Kony is a horrible, horrible man whose LRA has kidnapped tens of thousands of children and forced them into both military service and sexual slavery. Most major …

January 22, 2012, 9:58 am

Newt and the Unbearable Whiteness of the GOP

By Laurie Essig

A friend joked about Rick Santorum’s belated victory in Iowa: “Who cares that six more white people in Iowa voted for Santorum.” Of course, Iowa is pretty darn white. Its population is 91-percent white.

South Carolina is not. In fact its population is 66-percent white and 29-percent black.

So how is it that 98 percent of the voters in the South Carolina GOP primary were white? Not to mention 98 percent of the voters were Christian (with 37 percent of those Catholics and 42 percent Protestant).

According to Courtland Milloy over at The Washington Post, the unbearable whiteness of the GOP is not talked about enough given that

those who call themselves Republicans have coalesced around nothing more than their whiteness. What else could it be? Certainly not economic self-interest.

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes