A Response to Richard Alba’s “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority”
That politics undergirds censuses is a truism. At least since Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
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Race
How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence
Article originally published at nonsite.org. Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a
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The Black-Labor-Left Alliance in the Neoliberal Age
The report, A Future for Workers: A Contribution from Black Labor, brings together the perspectives and voices of significant black
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Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle
Born as a Twitter hashtag, Black Lives Matter has evolved into a potent alternative to the political paralysis and isolation that racial justice proponents have faced since the election of Obama. In just over two years, the young movement has reinvigorated confrontation politics, giving voice to a popular and righteous rage, establishing a new touchstone of grassroots resistance…
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The Strange Career of the Voting Rights Act: Selma in Fact and Fiction
Ava DuVernay’s film Selma has generated yet another wave of mass mediated debate over cinematic representation of black Americans’ historical experience of racial injustice. The controversy’s logic is at this point familiar, nearly clichéd. DuVernay and others have responded to complaints about the film’s historical accuracy, particularly in its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson, with invocations of artistic license and assertions that the film is not intended as historical scholarship.
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“The Sanctity of Private Property”: The Civil Rights Act and the Limitations of American Liberalism
In marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, commenters frequently lamented the contrast between progress toward legal equality and the persistence of economic inequality today. “The decision to pursue purely legal change, and to leave economic relation- ships alone, says much about the intellectual and moral limitations of midcentury liberalism,” wrote journalist Clay Risen.
Read MoreThe Prison Industrial Complex: A Growth Industry in a Shrinking Economy
As tough as life was for American workers at the close of the twentieth century, the dawn of the twenty-first
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