I wasn’t white before I came to America. In Belarus, we were all the same color, save a few college exchange students from Africa. And even they were not black, just foreign. For better or worse, race wasn’t a thing that we thought about. Plenty of my people were racist, to be sure; they just weren’t white. 

In America, whiteness attached itself to my Eastern European skin like an invisible protective shield. I didn’t choose to be white; I was just shown and told that I was. When I move to a new city, friends tell me what "safe" neighborhoods to live in and what neighborhoods to avoid. You can guess the racial composition of the two.

Whiteness is arbitrary. It’s insidious. It breeds privilege. And violence. And fear. Black and brown people in America may have shaken off their shackles, but whiteness continues to crush their best efforts to be free. Or to be.

It occurs to me that, like me, my white American friends did not choose to be white. But wishing whiteness away doesn’t work. White guilt doesn’t help either: it is self-indulgent, stifling, and pointless. 

But I submit that the helplessness we feel is a sign of hope. The very arbitrariness of whiteness might also be its undoing. As we stand among the sea of black and brown people demanding their right to be, our whiteness may finally start to wash away. 

This morning, thousands of secret cheaters who employed the services of AshleyMadison.com, a discrete dating site for married people, woke up to awful and unnerving news: the website has been hacked and their data compromised. The hackers have stipulated that unless AshleyMadison.com and other affiliated sites are completely shut down, customer data, including names, addresses, pictures, and credit card numbers, will be leaked and the cheaters exposed. Although the mainstream reaction has been to sensationalize and celebrate the exposé, some outlets, like Salon.com, have presented a more nuanced view of the scandal, arguing instead that even "cheating dirtbags" have a right to privacy. 

I'd like to further complicate this analysis by historicizing the phenomenon of public shaming in popular press. Hacktivism, after all, is not at all a recent phenomenon. Sure, in the technical sense of the definition, the history of hacktivism is in its infancy. But the idea behind the AshleyMadison.com hack goes back to at least to the 1870s. 

Woodhull's true motivation was not just to shame Beecher for sexual impropriety; it was to out Beecher as a free love practitioner and to therefore push him to promote the movement's ideal as a legitimate way of being in relationships. Woodhull, you see, was not after scandal for scandal's sake. Her goal was to expose Beecher, but to do so for a greater ideological purpose. You already practice free love, Mr. Beecher, Woodhull was saying by her allegations; might as well start preaching it from the pulpit. After all, as far as the activist was concerned, free love and the dissolution of monogamous marriage as a life-long bond was an inevitable step in society's evolution. 

Once Woodhull heard about Beecher's secret affair, she would later explain, she could simply not keep silent. To keep the affair secret, Woodhull believed, would be immoral. If true social reform were to take place, she later wrote, "reputations had to suffer." Comparing her exposé of Beecher's secret to the kinds of tactics used by abolitionists to publicize the horrors of slavery in order to change public opinion, Woodhull insisted that the ends justified the means. "A new public opinion had to be created," she wrote, "and [...] people had to be shocked," and "individual personal feelings had to be hurt."

So, you see, the Beecher scandal was not set in motion in order to suppress the pastor's sexuality; it was, instead, intended as a mechanism to change public opinion about love and relationships. The hackers of AshleyMadison.com want the site to seize all operations. They may be successful. But the truth is that marital infidelity in not going to be cured. New social media platforms will enable other ways of discrete cheating. 

Perhaps we can take a lesson from history, and instead of merely shaming those people of whose secret lives we disapprove, we can take this moment to bring the issues at hand--of marriage, infidelity, monogamy, honestly, and trust--into the public square and away from the loneliness of our computer screens. 

These are some tips and suggestions that I've picked up from several of my teachers and colleagues:

• If possible, always read with a pen/pencil in hand. Highlight important passages. Mark places that bring up questions for you. Circle important words and concepts. If reading on the screen (desktop, laptop, or tablet), use software that allows you to edit the document. For the iPad/iPhone, I highly recommend Notability. It costs $3.99 but is worth every penny.
• Read the title. This step seems painfully obvious, but is frequently overlooked as an important point of orientation and focus for the book or article at hand. In case of a book, also read the table of contents and glance over the index, which will give you an idea of what names, subjects, organizations, and historical events will be highlighted in the book most frequently are are therefore important for the argument.
• Read the introduction and conclusion before reading the body. In case of an article, read the abstract, the first few paragraphs, and the conclusion. A well-structured secondary source will introduce the thesis early, support the thesis with compelling evidence throughout, and end by restating and expanding the thesis.
• Read the first and last sentences of every paragraph. Skim the rest. This should give you a good idea of the content of each paragraph and help you track how the argument develops. Note that certain paragraphs will stand out as particularly compelling and/or informative, in which case you should carefully read the entire paragraph. 
• After reading each chapter or article, pause to write down your own summary of the piece in a couple of sentences. Do not merely repeat the main argument. Rather, summarize it and consider some questions that the text introduces for you.

Another helpful approach is STAMP reading, adapted from a Bowdoin College writing guide:

• Structure: How the author structures their work will help you understand the overall argument. Does the structure support or detract from the thesis?
• Thesis: What is the central point of the piece? 
• Argument: How does the argument of the piece unfold? What internal logic does it follow? What assumptions does the author hold? Evaluate the internal logic and the holistic logic of the piece. Does the author frame successful questions? And does she or he provide convincing answers? 
• Motives: Why was this written? Who is the author in conversation with? The introduction will give you some of that information, but you should also notice other instances where the author engages with other scholars or schools of thought. Presumably, the piece is written in order to complicate an existing assumption or to contribute to an understudied subject. Identify the author’s motivation for writing. 
• Primaries: Although written in a tiny font and frequently entirely overlooked by students, footnotes actually provide a wealth of information that the main body of the text omits. Glance at the footnotes frequently, particularly if you are interested in the subject matter for your own research or if you are having trouble tracking the author’s references. 

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down laws prohibiting same-sex marriage has resulted in both exuberant celebration and a profound sense of defeat. As gay activists marched triumphantly in pride parades around the country, religious conservatives like Mike Huckabee mourned the loss of religious freedom.

In an ABC interview, the former Arkansas governor worried that the Court’s "judicial tyranny" has fundamentally "changed the process of how we govern" and made "people of conscience" and "people of faith" vulnerable to discrimination. Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. and Saint Augustine, Huckabee reminded his audience that "an unjust law is no law at all." Huckabee was especially concerned about the future of America and the unprecedented power of 5 "non-elected" Supreme Court "lawyers" to overrule 30 states’ bans on same-sex marriages.

In this climate, Huckabee believes, civil disobedience by Christian people is inevitable. Pastors, school administrators, and business owners whose constitutional rights are being violated by gay marriage will have to act in accordance with their conscience, not the law of the land.

Although those celebrating the Supreme Court decision will likely dismiss Huckabee’s remarks as paranoia or good old-fashioned bigoted panic, the Republican presidential candidate is right to be afraid. Same-sex marriage will, indeed, change America as a nation. And it will most definitely remain a contentious issue for conscientious objectors. Historical precedents abound. Marriage has changed many times. And it has changed American Christians and non-Christians alike in fundamental ways.

Until 1839, for example, a married woman could not own property, enter into contracts, or earn a salary while also being vulnerable to any penalties that came from her husband’s debts. A separation or the husband’s death could leave her penniless and defenseless against creditors. When the Married Women’s Property Acts were first introduced, (white) women slowly began to gain the rights to property, wages, and individualized debts, even as the opponents of this particular piece of legislation worried that women would stop taking their marital obligations seriously given such unprecedented financial freedom.

Likewise, as I’m sure Governor Huckabee knows, before the Civil War, enslaved people of African ancestry were not legally allowed to marry. Slaves, of course, created monogamous unions anyway, but even those arrangements required the permission of their white slave owners. And even then, these marriages were being systematically violated by rape and other forms of violence that tends to accompany the practice of owning other people as property.

It wasn’t until 1967, that marriage between members of different races became legal. In Loving v. Virginia, a century after Reconstruction came and went, the Supreme Court finally ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional. This, too, was a decision that changed the "traditional" definition of marriage forever. And I think it’s safe to say we are better off for it.

Whatever its merits, for most of American history, marriage has been an institution that systematically marginalized people based on gender, race, and class. If that is the kind of marriage that Huckabee wants to protect, then by all means, let him continue to deliver jeremiads to his concerned and defeated audiences. And if it’s not that "traditional" definition of marriage that he is, in fact, defending, then Huckabee must admit to being uncomfortable with a whole different kind of problem: a fellow citizen, but one who happens to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersex, having the same rights, privileges, and tax breaks as the good upstanding Christian that Huckabee is.

The truth is: Huckabee’s eulogy for the radical change in how—or whether—the state can legislate marriage is late by at least 136 years. Already in 1879, in response to the possibility of the introduction of a national marriage law, the Detroit Free Press editorialized, "What earthly business the United States government has with the question of marriage in the States, it is difficult to conceive." Huckabee is not the first—nor will he be the last—to express outrage at the idea that a Supreme Court can overrule state laws. Yet generally, when the Supreme Court has decided to go against antiquated state prohibitions on individual and communal autonomy, it has, for the most part, gotten these decisions right.

As to the question of whether gay marriage violates the rights of conservative Christian ministers, businessmen, and school administrators, I suppose the answer might be just what Huckabee wants us all to admit: the world is changing, and change—like growth—is always a little uncomfortable and slightly painful.

Yes, some businesses will suffer. But, as we know from other Supreme Court decisions, corporations, like people, are resilient. They, too, will adapt to the changing demands of the market. In terms of churches and school administrators, they have survived "worse"—desegregation, for instance, or ordination of people of different races, or constant battles over Bible readings and school prayer. They, too, are resilient. We can only hope that their theologies have enough generosity in them to allow queer people to have their wedding cake at the communal table that American democracy represents.