Danny duncan collum biography

Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
Danny (Daniel) Duncan Collum was born in 1954 in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he attended Greenwood public schools.
Danny Duncan Collum is assistant professor at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky.

•

Danny Duncan Collum

FROM THE TIME when slaveholder Thomas Jefferson failed to do the right thing at Monticello, on down to the very present, the relationship between white dissident movements and black America has been a tangled, complex, and often problematic one. Through the centuries of the American story, black interests have been consistent. But white interests have fluctuated, and white support for black aspirations has fluctuated with them. The history of these relationships has been especially shifty due to the very different interests of the different sorts of white people who have, at different times, either sought, or found themselves in, alliance with black America.

We, of all colors and classes, are inheritors of that history, and of its contradictions. Most white readers of this magazine will locate their forebears in that history of relationship and struggle in the historical stream epitomized by the white abolitionists of the mid-19th century. The abolitionists comprised a largely educated and affluent movement heavily concentrated in America's Northeast quadrant

•

Danny Duncan Collum is the author, most recently, of White Boy: A Novel (Apprentice House 2011). He teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort and is a contributing editor and columnist for Sojourners magazine. Collum is also the author of three nonfiction books (Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South, Rising to Common Ground, Black and White Together)and the editor of a fourth(African Americans in the Spanish Civil War). Collum was born and raised in Greenwood, Mississippi. He attended the Greenwood public schools and Mississippi College in Clinton. He later earned a bachelor's degree at Loyola University of New Orleans and the M.F.A. in creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. From 1980 to 1988, Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners, a Washington, D.C.-based monthly magazine of religion, politics and culture, and took a leading role in the advocacy and organizing work associated with the magazine. He later served as executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, a historical society devoted to the Spanish Civil W

•

Danny Duncan Collum

WHEN I TOLD my oldest son I was writing about universal basic income (UBI), he said, “All I know is that the Silicon Valley guys are pushing it, so it must be bad.” And he had a point. UBI has entered U.S. political debate most prominently as Silicon Valley’s favorite solution to a problem mostly of its own creation—massive permanent job loss due to artificial intelligence and robotics.

Under a universal basic income policy, all U.S. citizens would receive from the government a regular, permanent payment of, say, $1,000 per month, regardless of their other income or employment status. It wouldn’t get rid of the grotesque income inequality in the U.S. In fact, it wouldn’t even guarantee each person a decent standard of living. But it would get everyone up to the official poverty level.

Tech industry UBI proponents include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos. But the idea is most identified with former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who made it the defining issue of his long-shot campaign for the Democ