Very early in 2014, I shared this long essay from Film Crit Hulk on victim-blaming in sexual assault cases. It's pretty wide-ranging and hard to summarize (not to mention being written in the all-caps vocal style of the eponymous Hulk), but is a good collection of thoughts on how poorly we treat victims of sexual abuse, and how we can do better. WE NEED TO CHANGE HOW WE TALK ABOUT RAPE
I shared this CityLab piece on “the ruralization of urban areas” and this Guardian piece on the West Virginia water crisis together for a reason: be thankful for your water.
Then in February, Baltimore broke everyone's heart. Tracy Halvorsen's original Medium post drew impassioned responses from Tim Barnett on loving the city, Hasdai Westbrook on embracing the lessons of The Wire over continued white-L development (not actually written in response to the initial post, but still very relevant), Lawrence Lanahan on inequality, Steve Gondol (of LiveBaltimore) on not threatening or encouraging people to leave if you actually care about the city's future, and Mark Brown at the Baltimore Brew (again not written as a response) on transit and urbanism. Baltimoreans love talking about Baltimore.
At the time, I figured this post from Matthew Loftus on his (now defunct and private) blog was just another response, albeit a moving one. Reading it was actually the light-bulb moment in seeing Christianity as something I would have to reconsider more seriously after having rejected it (occasionally emphatically, occasionally apathetically) as a teenager. (I'll save the full conversion story for another post.)
Ralph Nader (of all people) in the American Conservative on Who Owns America? "Although the decentralists were dismissed by their critics as being impractical, as fighting against the inevitable wave of ever-larger industrial and financial companies empowered by modern technology, their views have a remarkable contemporary resonance given today’s globalized gigantism, absentee control, and intricate corporate statism, which are undermining both economies and workers. . . .
The decentralists had a concrete awareness of the ways and means of corporate power that was way ahead of many of today’s conservative thinkers, who believe that the marketplace will suffice to check this ever-boiling force of business power. Many contemporary conservatives exhibit such a focus on government and keeping it at arm’s length that they have neglected to rigorously propose an alternative locus of power, one that would take up many functions of government and restrict what they call 'crony capitalism.'
Part of the reason for this contrast between thinkers of the Depression years and the ones we have now is that the earlier conservative writers were close to the dirt-level poverty, land dispossession, foreclosures, and overturning by Big Business of a historic way of rural life which empirically grounded their diagnoses and reforms. There were no screens to look at daily in their abstract workplaces and households to distract them from grim reality."
Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic – The Case for Reparations: "To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the 'achievement gap' will do nothing to close the 'injury gap,' in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records. . .
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate. . . we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. . .
I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders."
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate. . . we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. . .
I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders."
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