Parisian Phoenix Publishing

Because I have an academic background in world history and two undergraduate degrees that include the study of French, certain family members have accused me of being unpatriotic and comment that I probably want to leave this country. These family members, of the MAGA variety, disowned me after my father’s death, before the last presidential election… so there’s that.

By nature, I am a critical theorist. With my background, it’s hard not to be. As a journalist, I learned to subdue my opinions and find representatives of all the views I could find and assemble stories that gave everyone a chance to speak truth— therein lies the crux, truth is subjective. If you ask all parties in a divorce (husband, wife, children, even the grandparents), everyone has a different version of why the marriage fell apart.

Are they wrong? No. Biased? Yes.

So a good journalist thinks out all the angles and provides information on them so an individual can decide for themselves. It doesn’t matter who’s “right.” Like a lawyer, a good journalist provides all the evidence and has no say in the final outcome.

A critical theorist examines an issue or a topic and considers how it went wrong to apply those lessons to future situations.

I study post-colonial Francophone Africa and how the stereotypes the French cast upon their colonial Muslim population (and the results of that prejudice, example: The Algerian War) resemble contemporary American imperialistic policies and outcomes.

You see how that comes back to the United States of America?

I study history, and other countries’ colonial past, to understand what might happen here.