Essays by

Jesse McCarthy

“We Are All Rachel Dolezal”

This is part II of Jesse McCarthy’s interview with Asad Haider, the author of Mistaken Identity (Verso, Spring 2018).

The Consolations of Identity

Asad Haider is the founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

Black Fire

We are living through a moment of national reckoning.

The Time of the Assassins

We know that the disasters of war overwhelmingly unfold elsewhere, that our lives are safer and more sheltered than they’ve ever been, and yet a crowded subway entrance, an airport terminal check-in desk, anywhere the density of human traffic accrues, is liable to provoke an invisible wrinkle of dread. … We live in a state of passive suspense, like Goya’s figure of Reason, who sleeps seemingly at ease as the monsters of Superstition and Folly crouch over him and close in from above.

Back in the Day

In 1988 no one in France took the hip-hop movement seriously. It was the rec-room era. Joey Starr and Kool Shen were just two kids from Seine-Saint-Denis, the 93rd ward, a neglected tract of housing projects on the northern outskirts of Paris …

Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?

No amount of monetary compensation can rectify a debt that consists in the broken promise of a social contract … its abrogation is a moral debt.