Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss our most popular post last week…Tala Woods’ superb interview with feminist Instagrammer Annie Wade Smith.
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The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship (Martha S. Jones for The Atlantic)
Birthright citizenship is a popular topic in the United States right now, thanks to the president’s threats to revoke it — something experts on all sides of the political debate agree isn’t actually possible. This piece, however, puts the larger conversation into a broader context, explaining how and why birthright citizenship became a practice in the US.
It might be easy to forget the origins of birthright citizenship. In many of our lives, it was conferred silently, without ceremony or much paperwork. We might assume it was always this way. It turns out that the quintessentially American story is not one about how it has always been this way. Instead, it is one about struggle—about how our democracy has been made to an important degree by people, like former slaves, who helped build the nation and asked in turn to be full members of it. It is a story about how people largely relegated to the margins make their way to the center—fitfully, unevenly, and not without opposition. Still, their striving, their quest, their insistence that citizenship is a two-way street and a bargain, rather than a gift or a privilege, is the legacy left to us by former slaves who saw themselves as belonging by virtue of birthright long before most others did.
Becoming Anne Frank (Dara Horn for Smithsonian Magazine)
The Diary of Anne Frank is required reading in schools all over the world, and a quintessential tale of the Holocaust that many come to view as defining. Her actual story is more complicated, and at a time when Jewish people are under threat in many corners of the world, the dulling of Frank’s Jewish identity is an important topic to explore.
The runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
Theater of Forgiveness (Hafizah Geter for Longreads)
White supremacy has been a part of the United States since it was colonised, and it was honed to a sharp edge under slavery. This piece explores the expectations placed on Black communities, and why it’s so difficult to grapple with contemporary racism when people still haven’t reckoned with the past.
Performing forgiveness became a crucial aspect of slaves’ lives. They held forgiveness in their mouths as both salve and armor. But if Christianity is the master’s tool, then surely white supremacy is its house and the Christian ideal of forgiveness will never be able to address, dismantle, or truly forgive white supremacy. So what happens when the performance of Black forgiveness gets repeated through several generations until it becomes ritualized and transformed into tradition?
The Privacy Battle to Save Google From Itself (Lily Hay Newman for Wired)
Google claims to care about your privacy, but that claim is at fundamental odds with the company’s own mission and purpose. Even as people work internally on privacy initiatives and pride themselves on making its products safer for users, there’s a fundamental tension: Google’s users are a product, an extremely valuable one, and so is their data.
Google is not a consumer software company, or even a search company. It’s an ad company. It collects exhaustive data about its users in the service of brokering ad sales around the web. To do so, Google requires an extensive understanding of the backgrounds, browsing habits, preferences, purchases, and lives of as many web users as possible, gleaned through massive data aggregation and analysis. In third-quarter earnings announced last week, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported $33.7 billion in revenue. About 86 percent of that came from Google’s ad business.
The Extinction of Wilderness (Emily Atkin for The New Republic)
Bit by bit, we are losing nature, and the rate of that loss is accelerating. Once untouched lands are compromised by humans — for resource exploitation, housing, farming, or anything else — they can’t come back. As the number of humans, and their demands, grows, can we still keep the Earth wild?
In 2016, an international team of scientists set out to determine how much of the earth’s land is still wild. They were alarmed at what they found: Deserts, grasslands, tropical and boreal forests are all rapidly disappearing. In the last two decades, 10 percent of terrestrial wilderness has been replaced by buildings, farmland, and other development. Only 23 percent of all land on the planet remains relatively untouched.
Photo: Mike’s Birds