In 1982 the historian Barbara Fields called it "that favorite question of American social scientists—whether race or class 'variables' better explain 'American reality'" and more than 40 years later that question is still ubiquitous in U.S. research.
Not sure why I thought the answer could have been cute, but Wikipedia says Texas had to give up that land bc it wanted to be a slave state and the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery north of parallel 36°30' north. TX wanted slavery so bad it gave up that whole strip of land.
Americans are a piece of work. We can’t fathom a society where we pay people to stay home. The two options we can conceive of are: everyone stays out and dies from illness, or everyone stays in and dies from poverty. We don’t stop to ask, might there be an alternate arrangement?
This isn’t about greed. It’s survival. People can’t buy food or pay rent or mortgages. Small businesses are closing. Dentists and doctors are going into the red. Schools are going to start closing. This is the destruction of society we’re talking about.
Years from now we’ll learn that the death toll was many times higher than was ever reported in these last odious months. The West is responsible for this carnage and there is simply no solution other than remaking the world order.
Congratulations to Latinos in California! Alex Padilla will become California's first Latino U.S. Senator, and the fifth Latino in the current Senate. This brings the grand total of Latino U.S. Senators who oppose Medicare for All to 5 out of 5! 100%! Representation MATTERS!
Harvard students have been doxxed and harassed in recent weeks for speaking out against Israel's genocide in Gaza. President Claudine Gay has not protected these students but today she emailed the campus to "condemn" the phrase "from the river to the sea." Here is my reply:
Had Congress passed the Harris-Sanders-Markey Covid relief bill back in May, each person in the US would be ending the year with an extra $20,000, up to three kids. That’s $100,000 for a family of two adults and three kids. Our discussions about Christmas would be so different.
I will say, though, that a part of me *hopes* that Harvard asks for three days of wages back from me. The richest university in the world pays its workers how much to live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? I will post that screenshot so quick 🤣
A nontrivial number of academics who’ve dedicated their lives to researching social inequalities aren’t actually personally or politically committed to eliminating those inequalities; they just find them interesting to study.
When I went on a Harvard trip to Palestine a few years ago, I was the only person of Arab/Muslim descent who wasn’t sent to the interrogation room. My Spanish last name saved me from hours of interrogation over my ancestry. There’s no other explanation.
The Warren/Sanders divide between university professors and graduate students is probably about age and wealth, but it also reveals something else, I think: academics are, at their core, technocrats, trained to value technical expertise above social movements and political might.
When I had covid a few months back I skipped over any CDC or .gov websites on Google as I searched for guidance. The United States government is simply not a reliable source of information when its goals are *not* to mitigate covid spread or to keep people healthy.
Democrats now have a bigger advantage among white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.
Biden's student loan news is huge for me. I was a Pell grant recipient and this will clear all my student debt. I hope that people in my position know that 10-20k is not enough. Hopefully this is just a first step towards a massive restructuring of education in this country.
We don’t *have* to have skyrocketing unemployment. We don’t have to have tens of thousands of deaths. We don’t have to have this level of insecurity. There is no inherent tension between saving lives and “the economy.” All of these things are a choice. We’ve created this reality.
“… I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around & within me… I saw in theory then a location for healing.” bell hooks.
Some faculty put their bodies on the line to protect their brave students fighting against a genocide. Other faculty can’t bring themselves to sign an open letter. When presented with a choice, be a part of the former group.
Professors from GWU, AU, and Georgetown have joined the Gaza encampment at DC and formed a protective barrier for the students protesting in solidarity.
Imagine if we had a national healthcare system. If we had a responsible system of government that placed people over corporate profits. Imagine if we cancelled rent on Day 1, sent every adult $2000 per month indefinitely, and mass produced PPE. Just imagine.
The United States is the richest country in the world and has the highest number of deaths in the world from Covid. And Americans ask, what’s the big deal? Are things supposed to get bad soon? Clearly we’ve overreacted.
We never had ventilator shortages. My local pediatric ER converted to a COVID ward and now sits empty. What are we waiting on here? I’d genuinely like an answer. A vaccine? Because if that’s it, our society will be absolutely wrecked in the meantime.
trump gets shot and biden blames the kids protesting genocide, then no one votes for biden and the DNC blames the kids, repeat every election as the billionaires get richer and the planet burns
@dennismhogan
that’s something I meant to highlight when I posted. For years we “weren’t workers” in their anti-union propaganda. Now that we’re striking, we’re suddenly workers who owe them money, lol
My most important switch in grad school was realizing that I needed to approach my studies not as a student but as an ethnographer. I’m not learning from Harvard as much as I’m learning about it: how power operates, and how ‘knowledge production’ serves to preserve it.
I’m a graduate student at Harvard. Well-known Harvard professors have raised their voice to me on multiple occasions when I expressed views to the left of theirs. Conservative opinions are the status quo at Harvard. Any student of color with semi-radical politics knows this.
I wish I knew ten years ago that the academy isn’t a site of knowledge production, but a site of struggles over power. Things that confused me would have made so much more sense.
Idk who needs to hear this, but if your new paper is on a brutal, painful topic (climate collapse, slavery, racism, misogyny, genocide) maybe tone it down with the “I am soooo happy, thrilled, overwhelmed with joy, overflowing with excitement to announce…” language.
For years we have been saying that false claims of antisemitism are used to shield Israel from accountability. This logic is killing thousands of people. Enough-- Israel is not a Jew! Israel is a government that must be held accountable for war crimes and human rights abuses.
I was 8 or 9 when I got my first intro to abolitionist thinking. My mom and I were at a red light when we got rear-ended. The person sped off but was caught by a cop who happened to see the whole thing. My mom refused to press charges when she learned the driver was undocumented.
Some life news: I’m moving to Ann Arbor! This fall I’ll join the Michigan Society of Fellows as a postdoc and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Policy. This job is a dream come true and I’m so excited to be back in a place that’s already taught me so much.
#GoBlue
!
Gay should not have been forced to resign but it’s unfortunate to see that she still misses an obvious point: students on her campus never called for genocide against Jewish people. Liberals seem strangely addicted to assuming good faith from their detractors on the right.
It’s stunning to hear Israel called democratic when entry into Tel Aviv requires an interrogation to prove that you aren’t Arab, Muslim, or especially not Palestinian. Of course I’ve faced discrimination in US airports but never an explicit test of ancestry like in Israel.
This article is so unhinged, lol. I swear to god colleges that aren’t named Stanford and Berkeley exist and many of them are teeming with students who had super impressive high school records. Good luck making friends at ASU when you think non-Ivies are filled with nobodies.
This is a key problem with the categories “Latino” & “Latin America.” It flattens the world south of the US-Mexico border into a mythical non-white land that does not exist.
There are white supremacists ALL OVER Latin America.
These “Latinos are not a monolith” threads are great because they lead to a shocking conclusion: Latinidad is a myth and we are not a coherent group. Of course, Latino academics and writers can’t admit this. How else would we get jobs in a country obsessed with racialization?
Ph.D students suffer from anxiety and
#depression
at rates that far exceed the general population. A recent study suggests that mindfulness interventions—a form of exercise for the brain—may help.
@ScienceCareers
As news spread of Israel’s genocide, Zionists launched a brilliant campaign to muddy the news cycle: now searching “genocide” tricks readers into thinking that Palestinian(?) students(?) in the US(?) are committing (threatening?) genocide(?) against their peers(?) on-campus(?)
Actually, this is a good point: in the 80s/90s the major pro-apartheid argument was that granting Black South Africans equal rights would mean white genocide. It was racist hysteria then just as it is racist hysteria now. Solidarity with the anti-apartheid students then and now.
I don't recall 1986 protestors chanting genocidal slogans, preventing other groups of students from walking across campus based on their identity, and covering their faces with masks to escape accountability for bad actions. Different actions warrant different punishments.
Princeton tries to avoid a grad student union by preemptively raising salaries. Princeton students accept the raise and unionize anyway. I love this song.
@hoodqueer
if I sat down to write a dystopian novel about the absurdity of every day life under capitalism I don’t think I could have ever imagined a scenario like this
The Harvard letter was vile when it came out, and it’s vile now. So is it today, tomorrow, or the next that we’ll see the signatories tie themselves into knots to explain that yes, they signed the letter, but they didn’t *really* support Comaroff - it was all a misunderstanding!
I’ve been reflecting on how many of the social justice trainings I attended (and facilitated) in college were just about words people weren’t ‘supposed’ to say. There’s a line between political correctness and critical solidarity and I think we were on the wrong side of it.
1/ Qualitative interviews offer unparalleled richness but are rarely used in economics. Let's change that! New WP with
@Ingar30
uses an AI-driven approach to conducting q qualitative interviews, making them scalable, cheap, and ripe for both qualitative and quantitative analysis!
I can’t believe these checks are really gonna be for $1400. Historians are gonna have a field day with this one, lol. “Hold up, but all the 2020 speeches said $2000? What happened?” 😭
My mom has never read anything by an abolitionist and she wouldn’t call herself one. But I learned an important lesson about recognizing the humanity of others and the necessity of putting that humanity before any desire to “punish.” I learned that from her, not the academy.
The US criminal legal system is so absurd that a governor could shave 100 years off this person’s sentence and he still has to serve A DECADE. Ten years is a long, long, long time to be in prison. How much has happened in the last ten years of your life?
The Israeli officer at passport control didn’t like that my name was “Mo” and asked multiple times what it was short for, and whether my name was actually Mohammad. “That isn’t an American name,” he told me, and I asked what an American name was. He stared at me.
A damn word. I’ve been grinding my teeth at night with all these takes on how to make Raytheon, JPMorgan Chase, and the Pentagon “anti-racist,” like somehow “racist” has nothing to do with capitalism, war, or empire.
*Latino* *Senator* Alex Padilla now joins a proud lineage of Latino Senators - Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada - in opposing M4A. That's bipartisan Latino solidarity right there! 🔥🔥🔥
Some folks have recently commented on my approach to politics. To understand my politics, please know this: I grew up poor. My family is still poor. Grad school is the wealthiest I’ve ever been. Politics is life or death for me and I was never properly trained in respectability.
Sociologists are getting a crash course in abolition. For newcomers to abolitionist theory, here are a few tips to get started. [tl;dr It's not just about reading the words; it's about letting yourself believe that a better world is possible.]
We are so excited to welcome new
#UmichSoc
faculty member, Mo Torres!
Mo is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Policy.
Welcome to the team,
@motorresx
In 2017, the Harvard
@Kennedy_School
's Taubman Center for State & Local Government gave me $2500 to study the consequences of Michigan's Public Act 4. This is the law that sparked Flint's "water crisis." Today, the man who signed PA 4 into law was named a Taubman Center fellow.
There is a huge gap between (1) the role that the U.S. has played in destabilizing (to put it lightly) Central America and (2) how much of that history most people in the U.S. actually know. There’s so much we can’t know about the U.S. until we learn about Central America.
Ready for the even bigger scandal? Many of these academics actually think they’re *better* at their jobs because they don’t really care about the inequalities they profit from studying. Wild, right? 🙇🏽♂️
The Israeli guard studied each page of my passport once, then a second time. He called over two more guards, who took turns doing the same thing while others were ushered through in seconds. They asked for my father’s name and birthplace. I lied and said I didn’t know.
And yes, I intentionally typed "there is no data" instead of "there are no data" to signal that I, despite being a few semesters away from a PhD, remain one of The People and not a Snobby Academic.
I’ve never seen USians so eager to learn about the oppression Palestinians suffer. I’ve never seen USians so vocal in their opposition to Israeli violence. None of this would be imaginable without decades and decades of Palestinian activism, including in the United States.
I've been struggling lately with feeling motivated, focusing on the good, and staying productive. Today, my school hosted a "Self-Care for Scholars" workshop that really could not have come at a better time. These are some notes I took. I'm sharing to help me hold onto them.
The fires didn't just happen. Brazil's president Bolsonaro has actively fought environmental protections. These fires were built to destroy the rainforest to make way for cattle production. We need the Amazon to fight climate change. This is terrorism. Fascism will kill us all.
Remarkable stuff. Covid-19 rages on and Harvard eliminates pandemic sick leave and dependent care, announcing the news with the header “A Time for Connection and Community.” The neoliberal university on display: “community building” and “relaxing mandates” as anti-labor policy.
The deafening silence from tenured faculty across the country facilities this degree of police brutality on university campuses. This moment demands a united front. There is simply no time to cower in fear. Stand in solidarity with our students now.
Given the enormous economic desperation facing working families in this country today, I will not be able to support the recently announced Manchin-Romney COVID19 proposal unless it is significantly improved.
Read my full statement: