As we close out the first year of The Forum, the forces arrayed against the project of multiracial democracy are as alive as ever. Throughout 2022, the organized assault continued in our classrooms, in our courts, and at the ballot boxes, scripted and funded by the usual suspects, while also fueling stochastic violence against the marginalized in their homes, grocery stores, and places of worship. We began publishing on the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, locating that uprising’s fascist roots and anatomizing the contemporary movement to ban Critical Race Theory and the truthful teaching of America’s racist past from public schools.
Our writers responded with clear-headed outrage and comprehensive historical analysis to the year’s successive crises, including the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court attack on affirmative action, the attempts to suppress Black votes in the midterm Congressional elections, and the homophobic and transphobic mass shooting in Colorado Springs. We offer these pieces as an antidote to the both-sides, business-as-usual coverage from major media outlets that blithely discuss the survival of our democracy—and indeed the survival of its most vulnerable citizens—in the played-out terminology of the “culture wars.” As writer Sam Adler-Bell explained in one of The Forum’s first essays,
America has long lived by this dictum, that our union depends on collective acts of amnesia—ex obliviis unum. Indigenous genocide, the subjugation of women, the enslavement of Africans, the plantation regime, coerced “free” labor, the mine wars and anti-union terror, the criminalization of sexual minorities, nativist violence, lynching, and Jim Crow apartheid: all of these, at various times, have been consigned to common oblivion—ennobling omissions that undergird a vague but encompassing national pride.
Here at The Forum, we’re committed to fighting this amnesia with a collective, militant remembering, a truthful portrayal of our history and our present in the service of what we hope will be an ever more united resistance. To that end, we hope you’ll take the time to look back with us at some of the pieces we were proud to publish this past year. We believe you’ll find in them some tools for the fight ahead.
January 6 and the F Word
How the Trumpian putsch for power echoes the early fascist French insurrection of February 6
John Ganz | January 6, 2022
Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown
Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting
Sam Adler-Bell | January 13, 2022
Erasing Toni Morrison’s Vision
How today’s racial panics distort the great novelist’s legacy
Gene Seymour | February 17, 2022
The Worst of Times
How the paper of record enables the CRT moral panic
Chris Lehmann | February 17, 2022
Unwoke and Illiberal
A behind-the-scenes dispatch from the vanguard flank of the anti-CRT school wars
Jennifer C. Berkshire | March 3, 2022
Hollywood and the Censors’ Ball
On writing history with lightning and the fear of a Black audience
Niela Orr | March 24, 2022
Diary of a Targeted Teacher: Questioning Race Up Close
How teachers can help dismantle a lethal social fiction
Willie Randall | April 7, 2022
Juneteenth and the Hazards of Ceremonial Forgetting
On Juneteenth, political leadership must grapple with the intersecting crisis of racism and tyranny in the wake of January 6, instead of simply celebrating a holiday.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw | June 20, 2022
The Nightmare We Need to Let Sink In
Shaye Moss’s testimony should force us to reconsider what’s politically possible
Gene Seymour | June 22, 2022
A Pox by Any Other Name
The naming of a virus referenced a world of racist social thinking masquerading as science
Rafia Zakaria | June 24, 2022
Roe’s Reversal and The Specter of American Fascism
How the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs helps lay the groundwork for a fascist revival
Jeanelle K. Hope | July 1, 2022
Inside the Crypto Grift
The Black capitalism myth goes digital
Anthony Conwright | July 6, 2022
Avenue Q
How a deranged conspiracy movement moved into the mainstream of the American right
Adele M. Stan | July 15, 2022
State of the Unions
In the regressive monetary war on workers, labor is organizing to fight back
Jared Clemons | August 1, 2022
Colfax, Cruikshank, and the Latter-Day War on Reconstruction
Unearthing the deep roots of racialized voter suppression—and explaining how they shape ballot access today
David Daley | August 3, 2022
Diary of a Targeted Teacher: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
Facing another school year in the crossfire of the anti-CRT culture wars
Willie Randall | September 1, 2022
The Forgotten First Voting Rights Act
How the defeat of the 1890 Lodge bill presaged today’s age of ballot-driven backlash
Ed Burmila | October 17, 2022
The Anti-Antiracist Court
How the Supreme Court has weaponized the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education against antiracism
Jonathan Feingold | October 24, 2022
The Fed vs. Democracy
The stakes for the midterm elections couldn’t be higher, and the Democrats have ceded voters’ most urgent concerns to a few unelected officials
Jared Clemons | November 7, 2022
How to Start a Fire
In the wake of the mass shooting at a Colorado gay bar, a reactionary media has blood on its hands
Ben Miller | November 30, 2022
Ranked Choice Voting
The GOP underestimated Dobbs’s impact on the midterms, but the defense of abortion rights remains split along racial lines
Rafia Zakaria | December 2, 2022
Minority Rule(s)
Georgia’s competitive runoff election is the result of centuries of white supremacist efforts
Anthony Conwright | December 6, 2022
