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Hoagland's poem, in many ways, is the manifestation of white supremacy and class anxiety, and my response to it remains complicated. "The Change" is both "racially complex" (Hoagland's words) and racist. I don't know if that's an achievement — but I find it indicative of an aspect of the culture wars we're witnessing today.

I think about this as I consider Rankine's precise accounting of white discomfort in proximity to black anger. In Citizen, Rankine explores the intersection of Serena Williams's ascension as a great athlete with public critiques of her body, her demeanor, her confidence, her periodic expressions of outrage and joy against the gaze of her white audience.

"What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like?" she asks. "Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's 'I feel most colored when I am thrown against a white sharp background.'" Rankine's close study of how the world receives Williams — and by extension black bodies — reveal what was so troubling about Hoagland's 2002 poem: Its racism is casual because it lives in the language.

Author Interviews

In 'Citizen,' Poet Strips Bare The Realities Of Everyday Racism

There's the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we've evolved. We want to erase the nightmarish truth that at one time, we were the kind of people who would inflict unspeakable cruelties to another human being.

We're afraid to confront the racism that is embedded in the very marrow of our systems and institutions. We look everywhere to negate that fact. But Rankine's clear and direct accounting of mundane yet fraught interactions between races — what some categorize as microaggressions — accumulate and magnify, revealing the stultifying biases that inform structural racism.

"For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person," she writes. "Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please." Rankine, who recognized the quiet violence in Hoagland's words and others, makes this struggle visible throughout the book.

Rankine's Citizen demands that we not look away.

Syreeta McFadden is a columnist for Feministing, and a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US

Poetry

In 2003, then 21-year-old Jin, a Chinese-American rapper, released a single called "Learn Chinese" that was widely circulated but not well-received:

"Y'all gon' learn Chinese, when the pumps come out, you're gon' speak Chinese...

You must be crazy, we don't speak English, we speak Chinese
And the only popo we know,
Is the pigs on the hook out by the window
Each time they harass me I wanna explode
We should ride the train for free, we built the railroads
I ain't your 50 cent, I ain't your Eminem, I ain't your Jigga Man, I'm a CHINA man"

Jin was riding high when "Learn Chinese" came out: he came up in the rap scene as a battle rapper, scoring seven wins in BET's 106 & Park freestyle competitions, and was the first Asian-American to release a solo album with the label Ruff Ryders.

Music News

Jin, 'The Chinese Kid Who Raps,' Grows Up

But the song and its music video drew mixed reactions, to say the least. "Learn Chinese" sampled cliched Orientalist tropes, calling on the snake-charmer tune and Yellowman's 1981 song "Mr. Chin." It also incorporated the nasally sounds of a Chinese zither. Critics charged Jin with peddling in Chinese-American stereotypes, invoking reductive imagery without pushing back on it.

As music critic Dorian Lynskey wrote for The Guardian in 2005, Jin was struggling to balance visibility with integrity: "However much Jin wants to avoid racial pigeonholing, these are his most original and exciting tracks."

Loren Kajikawa, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Oregon, says the producers of "Learn Chinese" were probably trying to play on Jin's "sonic otherness," making his apparent foreignness seem interesting while trying — but failing — to defy the same stereotypes he was calling on.

"As a whole, it starts off promising, because he's trying to push back on these stereotypes and subvert them," Kajikawa tells me, "But what he ends up giving you in place is this kind of Chinatown make-over of a gangster-rap video, which doesn't really challenge the kind of conventions or norms in hip hop, which is fine if you're not trying to do that, but I think he was."

Despite the notoriety of "Learn Chinese," or perhaps because of it, Jin faded from the spotlight soon after that album. Now, at 32, he's trying to stage a comeback. His new album is called XIC:LIX — 14:59 — which some have taken as a nod to what could be the end of his 15 minutes of fame. He reflected in an Arena interview last fall about what it was like being one of the lone Asian-Americans in his industry at a very young age — and what he sees as missed opportunities:

"With 'Learn Chinese' while I was in the studio with 'Clef and the whole Ruff Ryders environment, I think the intentions were there. The intentions were pure, but the execution may have been where there was a miscalculation, even if you talk about visually, the video, running around and doing karate kicks and sliding on the floor and all that extra stuff.

At the time, like I said in the verse, I'm in my early 20s, I'm just having a ball. I'm enjoying it. Whereas now I look back on it, I'm like, 'Wow, that was such a great opportunity to make a statement and this is the statement that you made Jin?' "

In a song on the new album called "Chinese New Year," Jin mixes Cantonese and English and raps about and what happened after the release of "Learn Chinese":

"While we on the topic, I got something to reveal,
Can I be real though,
I mean really real,
'Cause at one point,
I was losing sleep
Thinking about the first song that I ever released,
Looking back, it was a lesson in my eyes,
And if you never heard of it,
Hey that's just a blessin' in disguise.
Learned Chinese dropped,
Things never been the same,
Credibility gone, yo, charging into the game.

... I was barely 21, but that's not an excuse
I got on my own two feet and walked in that booth.
To make y'all proud, that's what I'm trying to do here,
Because for me, every day is Chinese New Year."

"It's like Jin made a 180," says Oliver Wang, a professor at California State University, in a recent profile by Jean Ho at Buzzfeed. "On 'Chinese New Year,' it's all about looking inward via introspection and he basically apologizes for his 21-year-old self on 'Learn Chinese,' which is striking since it's rare to see many rappers walking back their own earlier catalog."

As Jin tries to retake the stage — another potential brush with success, another segment of his career to reflect on — it seems clear that it was never fair to ask a 21-year-old, the only big-name Asian-American in the game at the time, to make everybody happy.

Audio for this story from All Things Considered will be available at approximately 7:00 p.m. ET.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in another case that threatens the survival of Obamacare. This one doesn't challenge the constitutionality of the law itself, it merely challenges the legality of one of the most important parts of the system — subsidies so that everyone can afford health care. If the court strikes down the subsidies for people who live in states that chose not to set up their own exchanges, and who get their health coverage from the federal marketplace — healthcare.gov — it would begin to unravel the entire Obamacare project. Here's why that could be politically damaging to both Democrats and Republicans:

1. The biggest political threat is to the president.

A ruling for the plaintiffs would be a mortal blow to the president's signature legislative achievement. Up to 8 million people could lose their subsidies in 34 states, leaving them unable to afford coverage. Premiums would spike, because presumably only the sickest people would be willing to pay the full cost of coverage. Insurers would leave the market. It would delegitimize the law. Democrats had been been touting its success — around 11 million people are now signed up — and enjoying a momentary lull in the intensity of the arguments over the law would have to scramble to preserve what they could. The political slugfest over the Affordable Care Act would begin again.

2. Republicans might not be the winners.

Democrats would go on the offensive, blaming Republicans for every case of a person who lost coverage just before giving birth, or having another round of chemo.

There would be a "good-riddance caucus" inside the GOP to be sure — Republicans who argue that the best strategy is to sit back and watch the whole edifice of Obamacare collapse in a heap.

These Republicans think that chaos in the marketplace would punish Obama, and that Americans would rise up even more than they have and demand an end of the law.

But that view is not universally shared inside the GOP.

Many Republicans including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell see an opening for Republicans to switch their tactics — finally — from repeal to replace if the court ruled against the government.

McConnell, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, called it an opportunity for a mulligan — a major do-over of the whole health care law. Something he believes is more achievable than total repeal.

3. It will be hard for Republicans to unify around a replacement for Obamacare.

The GOP has been trying for six years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare and they haven't been able to. But now a group of lawmakers led by Paul Ryan in the House and Orrin Hatch in the Senate have come up with what they call an "Offramp from Obamacare" — legislation that would temporarily restore the lost subsidies and then replace them with other forms of financial aid like tax credits. They'd also do away with the law's minimum coverage requirements and the individual mandate.

But why would a party that can't agree on how to fund the Department of Homeland Security agree on a strategy to take advantage of a win in King v. Burwell?

And would President Obama agree to the kind of changes in the health care law that Republicans would demand?

4. Republican governors will be under tremendous pressure.

Without a major fix by Congress, governors in states that chose not to set up exchanges would be under pressure to do so in order to prevent hundreds of thousands of their citizens from losing coverage.

Conservatives who are arguing for a legislative fix say these Republican governors, who held out against Obamacare, should not be left high and dry.

But fixing the damage to the ACA that the court might impose will require not just cooperation, but timely cooperation, something that is in very short supply in Washington these days.

A lot of parents start worrying about paying for college education soon after their child is born. After that, there's the stressful process of applying to colleges, and then, for those lucky enough to get admitted into a good college, there's college debt.

But author Kevin Carey argues that those problems might be overcome in the future with online higher education. Carey directs the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation. In his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Carey envisions a future in which "the idea of 'admission' to college will become an anachronism, because the University of Everywhere will be open to everyone" and "educational resources that have been scarce and expensive for centuries will be abundant and free."

The End of College

Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

by Kevin Carey

Hardcover, 277 pages | purchase

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As an example of how the University of Everywhere might work, Carey points to an online course he took through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "It [was] the basic intro to biology class. ... The course was taught by a man named Eric Lander, who was the leader of the Human Genome Project in the 1990s. ... The amazing thing ... is that it was essentially in all respects exactly the same class that MIT freshmen take — so all of the same lectures that they saw were actually taped live while MIT students were taking them and then broadcast over this class a couple of weeks later. Both myself and tens of thousands of people around the world from almost every country on Earth who were taking this class online did the same homework, read the same textbooks, took the same exams — both the midterm and the final — and were graded on the same scale. It was an amazing class. I learned a tremendous amount."

Interview Highlights

On why the majority of American college students decide to go to college

When you ask people why they're going to college, overwhelmingly the answer is, "So I can get a better job," because you really can't make it in today's economy without some kind of credential from a post-secondary institution. So partly this [is] being driven by the fact that people need to go to college in order to make their way in the world and get credentials for, frankly, not the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that colleges charge today.

On how college "replicates privilege"

"If only the rich can afford to go to the 'good colleges,' then we don't have a system of opportunity; we have a system of replicating privilege that already exists."

You just have to look at the numbers and you see that people who attend America's most elite universities are disproportionately wealthy, disproportionately well-off, in many cases disproportionately white; their parents both have college degrees, which is unusual. And because college is getting more and more expensive, it's less of a meritocracy, I would argue. If only the rich can afford to go to the "good colleges," then we don't have a system of opportunity; we have a system of replicating privilege that already exists. I think that — given the wider trend of growing inequality in the United States of America — is a huge, huge problem.

On what's wrong with college admissions

The problem with college admissions is that colleges don't really know that much about students. All they kind of have to go on is an SAT [or ACT] score, which is kind of a blunt instrument ... a high school transcript, which is sort of hard to figure out, [and] maybe a personal essay, who knows who wrote the personal essay. So they tend to fall back on, "Is this person a legacy? Did they go to a 'good high school?'" Well, everyone figures out where "good high schools" are and people pay a lot of money in tuition if it's a private high school, or in the real estate market to buy a house near the good high school. And so again the opportunities for students to go to particularly elite colleges that are often the stepping stone toward the best jobs in government or business are in many ways constricted to a narrow band of people.

"Colleges are expensive because they can be, because they want to be and because they were built to be that way."

On why college is so expensive

Colleges are expensive because they can be, because they want to be and because they were built to be that way. ... Colleges are expensive because they occupy a very privileged position in American society. The economy has changed so much, a lot of the blue-collar jobs have disappeared such that people can really only succeed and make a different kind of living if they have some kind of college credential. So if you're in a position where you're the only kind of organization that will sell those experiences and those credentials, then you have a lot of power over the market. Colleges are also driven to compete with one another for status and prestige. Most colleges are nonprofit: They're not trying to maximize their revenue, what they're trying to do is maximize how important they are so that people who work there seem important and like special people.

i

Kevin Carey's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Amanda Gaines/Courtesy of Riverhead hide caption

itoggle caption Amanda Gaines/Courtesy of Riverhead

Kevin Carey's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Amanda Gaines/Courtesy of Riverhead

On the term "University of Everywhere"

The University of Everywhere is the university that I think my children and future generations will attend when they go to college. ... They will look very different in some ways, although not in other ways, from the colleges that I went to and that many of us have become familiar with. This will be driven by advances in information technology: So whereas historically you went to college in a specific place and only studied with the other people who could afford to go that place, in the future we're going to study with people all over the world, interconnected over global learning networks and in organizations that in some cases aren't colleges as we know them today, but rather 21st-century learning organizations that take advantage of all of the educational tools that are rapidly becoming available to offer great college experiences for much less money.

On the advantage of online education programs like edX, which he took his MIT class through

They will and should be much, much less expensive than the tens of thousands of dollars that people are now obligated to pay for college. The online class that I took from MIT — and again, this is exactly the same class that MIT teaches to its own students — cost me nothing. It was free. I signed up and I took the class. All of the classes offered, hundreds of the classes offered by edX from Harvard, MIT, some of the best universities in the world ... they're free. And the reason is because it doesn't cost them any more money to let one more person take the class. Once they've made the investment of building it and taping all the lectures, the marginal cost of letting an additional person take it is nothing. So this kind of marginal cost pricing — where people only pay the marginal cost of what it costs to provide them with the service — is going to drive a lot of the economics of higher education in the future.

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Second, people will have a far broader access to educational materials and to other students than they have in the past. ... The design of the university is a design that comes from scarcity, so if you wanted to learn, traditionally, until very recently, you had to go someplace where the other students were, where the smart professors were and where the books were. It was expensive to put all of those things together in one place. ... So there could only ever be a relatively small number of places like that and if you ran a place like that you could decide who comes in the gates and who doesn't, and charge people a lot of money.

We are now headed into a time of abundance when it comes to educational resources. All the books in the world are now available on your iPad or your phone or your computer, or will be soon. The same is true for all of the lectures of all of the smartest people in the world, and the course notes and the problem sets. ... Once they're built, the cost of providing them to the 10,000th student or the millionth student is almost nothing. One aspect of the University of Everywhere is it isn't going to cost nearly as much as $60,000 a year, which is what a private college would charge you today.