Will Shetterly's Blog, page 75

I was in a surprisingly enjoyable discussion about religion and race

In my experience, many and maybe most Americans hate to talk about class and love to talk about race. When they do, discussions about class tend to stay pleasant while discussions about race quickly turn angry if there's any disagreement. That may be because most Americans think they're middle class and are aware the concept's vague while most Americans are sure of their race and have a strong

Confusing cause and effect: wealth and education

How income varies among U.S. religious groups | Pew Research Center ranks US religious groups by their wealth and states reasonably, "While there is a strong and proven correlation between education and income, it’s harder to know whether there also is a link between religion and wealth." But Pew links to a New York Times article titledA Simple Equation: More Education = More Income, which

Reluctantly using Cory Doctorow to illustrate how the left is often fuzzy on race and class

I've met Cory Doctorow a few times, and I've always thought he's a smart, nice guy, the sort who makes the world a better place. I like his work, both on BoingBoing and off it. He's said some astonishingly sweet things about mine. He often provides essential information about the political world—if you haven't readWhere the #trumpwon trend came from (not Russia), go read it now. So when I use

An interesting fact about Sanders and states that have some form of Election Day Registration ("Same Day Registration")

Minnesota has had same-day voting registration for decades, and it's never caused any problems, so I've always wondered why other states have been so slow to adopt it. Part of the answer is same-day registration makes it harder for party leaders to control their parties, as the competition between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders revealed. According toVoter registration in the United States

Two Big Reasons I doubt Luke Cage is exposing much white racism in viewers—Now upgraded to Three Big Reasons!

When talking about race and Hollywood, I have to say I know I'm hardly a typical white viewer—I marched in Florida as a child in the '60s to end segregation, I graduated from a Washington, DC publichigh school that was something like 70% or 80% black, and most relevant when discussing Luke Cage, I went to theatres in black neighborhoods of DC in the '70s to see blacksploitation and kung fu

Ken Silverstein on the Southern Poverty Law Center

FromThis Week in Babylon—By Ken Silverstein (Harper's Magazine) Back in 2000, I wrote a story in Harper's about the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, whose stated mission is to combat disgusting yet mostly impotent groups like the Nazis and the KKK. What it does best, though, is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of those groups; hence the SPLC

Class appears to trump sexism in interrupting

How to Get Ahead as a Woman in Tech: Interrupt Men: "Not only do these three women interrupt everyone, gender- and level-agnostic, they represent three of the four biggest interrupters in the study. Their rates of interruption/hour are, respectively, 35, 34, and 32, with one male colleague in Level E coming in at 34 and literally everyone else in every level showing a lower rate." ETA: This

Why #BlackLivesMatter should be #PoorLivesMatter—now with graphics

A casual glance shows police killings are racially disproportionate to our population — though black people are 13.3% of the US, 25% of people killed by the police are black. But that hides another fact:Police killings are racially proportionate to America’s poor.Which makes sense—though there are exceptions from all races, most people killed by the police are poor. As I write,The Counted

Trump isn't a racist—he's a right-identitarian

When people talk about identitarians, we're usually talking about centrists and leftists who prioritize social identity, the sorts of people who think it's more important to vote for a black or a female neoliberal than for a white male democratic socialist. But the traditional forms of racism and bigotry are also identitarian, and Donald Trump's a fine example. He's not racist because he likes

Slut-shaming Lt. Uhura, or Feminists in Miniskirts

On Twitter, someone shared this quote by Rod Roddenberry, son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek: There was a great quote that D.C. Fontana said about Nichelle Nichols and having a black officer on the bridge and what my father said to that. Apparently, he would get letters from the TV stations in the South saying they won't show Star Trek because there is a black officer, and he'd