The punditry consensus appears to be that proposals aimed at cutting down on police violence definitely fall under the racial justice umbrella but proposals aimed at cutting down on poverty do not. I’ve eagerly consumed these kinds of arguments for the last six months, but I still cannot figure out why anyone thinks they make… Continue reading What Makes Police Reform Racial Justice?
Category: Race
Race and Class Part 2
In my last post, I broke down five social indicators — poverty, health coverage, employment, incarceration, and life expectancy — by race and class (using educational attainment to stand in for class). The point was to show that, while the disparities across classes are the biggest, there remains significant racial disparities within classes. This suggests… Continue reading Race and Class Part 2
Class and Race
There was a time a great while ago where leftists struggled over the question of whether race or class is the motive force of oppression and suffering in society. These days, with the intervention of intersectionality and considerable progress in sociology, this question has largely been answered by discarding its faulty premise. It needn’t be… Continue reading Class and Race
Actually, Breaking Windows Is Good
I wrote a piece in Gawker titled “Actually, Riots are Good: The Economic Case for Riots in Ferguson.” The piece is serious in many ways, but also trollish in a way that is obvious to a certain internet circle, but not others. What has surprised me is how underwhelming the criticisms of the piece has… Continue reading Actually, Breaking Windows Is Good
Last Place Avoidance and Poor White Racism
In a review on The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: Perhaps more importantly, I am less than convinced by Alexander’s rendition of white supremacy as a means of cleaving poor whites away from blacks. My view on this is that white supremacy is an interest in and of itself. It’s not clear to me… Continue reading Last Place Avoidance and Poor White Racism