“For good or ill, freedom and solidarity and social justice are not things we can get quickly.”
Tag: Inequality
Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds
“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”
“Redlining Does Not End”: Talking with Rebecca Marchiel on Housing and Racism
“They all wanted to imagine a different possibility of an integrated neighborhood, where folks worked together.”
“There’s No There There”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Future of the Left
“We don't have a party. That doesn't mean we need one big organization. We may need a few big organizations. But we need organizations!”
COVID Won’t Change Higher Ed, but Anti-racism Might
Racial-justice movements in higher education offer a template for how to dislodge education’s focus on entrenching prestige.
The Long Road to a New Ideology: Piketty on Trump, Democrats, and Inequality
“We need to have both the reparation and the universal perspective on economic justice.”
Harvard–Riverside, Round Trip
In the contemporary United States, higher education does more to exaggerate than relieve class and cultural divisions.
Getting Upsold by Real Estate
When prospective home buyers hire a real estate agent, they may end up getting more than they had pictured themselves bargaining for.
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
"So many people don’t think about food as political."
Don’t Save the University—Transform It
“Why read and write about literature while the world burns?” Because, in working to end the oppression faced by so many, the humanities can help.
Rebuilding Solidarity in a Broken World
We can begin where we live, because our neighbors and neighborhoods shape us in ways that are invisible but invigorating.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
Fast Food, Precarious Workers
Today—as in 1968—it remains to be seen if McDonald’s pivot toward racial justice will mean anything for how it treats its scores of Black workers.
Can the Crowd Speak?
Occupy Wall Street’s great achievement was to briefly create a community that prefigured a robust democratic culture.
To Heal the Body, Heal the Body Politic
Before 2020, the relationship that is the body was already ailing. COVID-19 heightens the need to heal it.
Rage and Uprising
A politics of rage does not equate emotions with irrationality or impulsive behavior, but can affirm equality, claim agency, and ask for justice.
Pandemic Déjà Vu
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been described as an unprecedented global event. Yet for some, the virus arrives with uncanny familiarity.
What Birders Don’t See
Rather than studying birds—and birders—in isolation, the time has come to see both as linked to the crises of racism and climate change.
Against Walled Worlds: Remembering Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
Could architecture and design transform a place like Gaza, and do so with justice? One of Sorkin’s last projects tackled exactly those questions.