Mychal Denzel Smith is a contributing writer at The Nation, a blogger at TheNation.com and a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is also a freelance writer and social commentator. His work on race, politics, social justice, pop culture, hip hop, mental health, feminism and black male identity has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian, Ebony, theGrio, the Root, Huffington Post and GOOD.
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Currently in its 15th printing, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s much-lauded
Thick(The New Press), eight incisive essays about navigating the world as a Black woman, was a National Book Award nonfiction finalist, won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize, and was named one of Lit Hub’s top 10 essay collections of the decade. Her critically acclaimed 2016 book on for-profit colleges (she once was a recruiter for two of them),
Lower Ed, was based on dissertation research for her PhD from Emory University’s Laney Graduate School in sociology.
McMillan Cottom is an associate professor in the iSchool at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, senior research fellow at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (UNC), faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
Delusions, justice, accountability and freedom in America
Paul C. Taylor, The Washington Post
Dec. 18, 2020
FacebookTwitterEmail Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream
By Mychal Denzel Smith
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Near the end of his small but indispensable book, Mychal Denzel Smith acknowledges a fear that haunts politically engaged writing. It is difficult to think it is useful to write more words, he says, while children languish in concentration camps at the border. Troubled times seem to require real action, not the futile gesture of feeding more words into the constantly churning content mill.
Even nearer the end of the book, Smith begins to disarm this fear. It arises only if one thinks like an American, he says, or - in some ways the same thing - like President Donald Trump. It arises only if one imagines being the single, messiah-like figure whose intercession is the key to victory. This fascistic impulse, he explains, requires the dismissal of community and rev