Three Ways America is fundamentally Broken That Probably Can’t Be Fixed

In this lecture he will argue that the United States is broken in three fundamental ways that do not lend themselves to simple short term solutions or to civil discourse because there is an unwillingness in the country to have an honest public debate about America’s most intractable shortcomings. Moreover, the paper suggests that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections, arguably a fluke, was nonetheless made possible, indeed may have been inevitable, because he exploited weaknesses in the American body politic: a flawed and outdated system for electing presidents that most Americans don’t even understand, the malignant problem of racism that has morphed into a malevolent white nationalism, and finally, a corrosive political divide that pits one America against the other at a time when the nation faces grave challenges. The case is made that the most cherished institutions that safeguard America’s freedom and democracy are being undermined by totalitarian forces within the country and powerful adversaries at the nation-state level outside its borders.

Miles White received his PhD in 2005 from the University of Washington in Seattle, United States. After that he accepted a two-year scholar-in-residence, post-doctorate fellowship from his alma mater, the Colorado College, where he began writing the book From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap and the Performance of Masculinity in American Popular Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2011) which examines race and ender in America through the lens of one of the country’s most captivating cultural exports: hip-hop music and culture. He has taught at the Colorado College, the University of Washington, Bigli University in Istanbul, Charles University in Prague, City University of Seattle in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Gyeongju University in Gyeongju, South Korea.

An award-winning newspaper journalist, Dr. White has interviewed and written about a number of luminaries in the field of music and entertainment, including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Al Green, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, Diana Ross, Keith Jarrett, and Gene Wilder. Retired to writing full time, he has published four volumes of short stories and is at work on a novel. Dr. White currently resides in Bratislava.

The event is free and open to the public. This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies in cooperation with the Office of International Relations and by the Austro-American Society for Styria (ÖAG).