BLOG

Riotous Fantasies and State Repression

“Our great cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul are under assault by people who do not share our values, who do not value life and the work that went into this, and certainly who are not here to honor George Floyd. So if you are on the streets tonight, it is very clear: You are

Read More »

Bleeding Kansas?

The expanding armed resistance to shutdown orders, from Michigan to Texas, are alarming enough in relation to the deadly spread of Covid 19. The far right is joining with mainstream Republicans, evangelicals, anti-vaxxers and others in this cause, lending it media spectacle along with the threat of real violence. But just as the far right

Read More »

Under the Blacklight

Kimberlé Crenshaw has been hosting a powerful weekly webinar for the past six weeks through the African American Policy Forum called Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Failures that COVID Lays Bare. The program has interrogated and analyzed the distinct risks that have fallen on communities of color, including exploitation of restaurant and agricultural workers, the

Read More »

Reopen Oregon Rally: Super-spreaders for Freedom

This morning I drove up to what I expected to be a small protest on a rainy Saturday at the state capitol. Nearing Salem on Interstate 5 I began seeing vehicles adorned with various patriotic symbols, and stickers on cars from across the Cascade mountains with stickers that read “Re-open Central Oregon.” When I got

Read More »

The Morbid Ideology Behind the Drive to Re-open America

Hi Readers, I’ve extended some of the themes in the blog in this new piece for The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=sharebtn&fbclid=IwAR2SXXy2HN3h0X-3vzcKiny34MrSaTtpiLFDgH1aXMWA9YIjrGhFreeP12I

Read More »

Death Drive to the Capitols

Opposition to lockdowns has finally turned into something resembling a movement in the last few days, with protests at state capitols in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Idaho, and other states demanding a re-opening of the economy. Like a zombie return of the Tea Party movement, these protests revivify activists from across the right-wing spectrum. Ammon Bundy’s

Read More »

Capitalism’s viral load

In capitalist society, the market is an inevitable force to which everything else must be reconciled, no matter how brutal the cost. Yesterday US Trade Secretary Peter Navarro complained to the New York Times that medical experts warning about the effects of ending suppression orders too soon “appear tone deaf to the very significant losses

Read More »

The coming depression: imagination and politics old and new.

With jobless claims now past an astonishing 16 million with no end in sight, the COVID 19 pandemic is likely to push the US into another Great Depression. If that is the case, the countless indices of human misery will put enormous pressure on political institutions that are ill-equipped to respond adequately, opening the way

Read More »

Magic elixirs and dangerous wish fulfillments.

The purported effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 has by now become a regular pitch in Trump’s daily press briefings on the pandemic. The Chief Executive has focused precious energy on the antimalarial drug despite no real research to support its use and plenty of evidence of its potential harm. It has even

Read More »
Producers Parasites Patriots, Race, and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity

In exploring the contemporary politics of whiteness, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes offer a powerful analysis of white precarity embedded in an antiracist critique of white supremacy in multicultural times. Producers, Parasites, Patriots is a necessary and welcome work.

 Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Race and American Political Development by Joe Lowndes

“This important volume places race at the center of political development in America. Leading lights and fresh voices in the field sweep across the history exploring new ways to think about the impact of racial division on the shape of the political order and the dynamics of its change. There is no better introduction to this subject, one of the massive facts of the American experience.”

Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University

From the New Deal to the New Right

“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”

Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White