Will Shetterly's Blog, page 82

The Queen's English, looking classy, and Marx's insight on ruling ideas

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” –Karl Marx, The German Ideology This is a truth so simple that it's often missed: the ruled get their guidelines from the rulers. "Proper English" is "The Queen's English", not "The Gardener's English". Ideal clothes and manners are "classy" or "high class", not "common" or "working class". The most praised art is the art

Understanding neoliberalism

If you want to understand our world, you have to understand neoliberalism. George Monbiot'sNeoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problemsisa decent short introduction. Don't let the photo of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher fool you: neoconservatives are only the conservative wing of neoliberalism. If you want to dig deeper, read David Harvey's A Brief History of

Hard numbers on race, poverty, and police killings—why #BlackLivesMatter should be #PoorLivesMatter

The racial and ethnic breakdown of US poverty in 2014 (fromPoverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity): White: 19,796,700 Black: 10,145,200 Hispanic: 13,214,100 Other: 3,865,300 Total: 47,021,300 Hispanics can be of any race, but according toWhite Hispanic and Latino Americans - Wikipedia,"As of 2010, 50.5 million or 16.3% of Americans identified as Hispanic or Latino. Of those, 26.7 million, or 53%,

And if your police violence movement ignores American Indian lives, it definitely isn't about police violence

Who Are Police Killing? — Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice: "The racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asian Americans." The subtitle forNative Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rateis "So why aren’t you hearing about it?" The answer is that the American Indian population is both

Place not race: Where Police Have Killed Americans In 2015

Where Police Have Killed Americans In 2015 | FiveThirtyEight: Police killings tend to take place in neighborhoods that are poorer and blacker than the U.S. as a whole. About 30 percent of the killings — 139 of the 467 — took place in census tracts that are in the bottom 20 percent nationally in terms of household income. A quarter of those killed by police died in tracts with majority-black

If your movement against police violence ignores a 6-year-old killed by the police because he's of the wrong race, your movement is not about police violence

I missed this story from 2015:Jeremy David Mardis: 6-year-old is the year's youngest US police shooting victim. According toShooting of Jeremy Mardis: For unclear reasons, Greenhouse and Stafford allegedly fired 18 rounds of ammunition into Few's vehicle[3]at approximately 9:30 p.m.[8]Few was struck twice, in the head and chest,[3]despite reportedly having his hands in the air, according

Boots Riley explains why class trumps race, plus some "place not race" links

FromBlack culture isn't the problem - systemic inequality is | Boots Riley: When black neighborhoods are compared with white neighborhoods of similar income levels, you see similar rates of crime. The fallacy of comparing white neighborhoods with black neighborhoods is in lumping together together wealthy and upper-middle-class neighborhoods (categories that not many black folks are in) with

the inherent classism of kyriarchy and subaltern theory

This is a followup to a post from 2013,kyriarchy: redundant word of the day. At the time, I quoted Fiorenza: The theoretical adequacy of patriarchy has been challenged because, for instance, black men do not have control over white wo/men and some women (slave/mistresses) have power over subaltern women and men (slaves)." But I completely failed to pay attention to the implications of that use

Today's police victim whose "white privilege" did not help her: Melissa Boarts

FromParents: We sought help for daughter but officers shot her - The Greeneville Sun: Boarts' mother, Terry Boarts, said she called 911 Sunday after her daughter left home and headed east toward Auburn on Interstate 85. She said her daughter had been diagnosed a bipolar manic depressive and was threatening to cut her wrists with a knife. Police followed Boarts for several miles as she left

The solution defines the problem—an observation about ideological wingwalkers

Yesterday Emma and I met a few friends at a bar, and "the personal is political" came up briefly. Several of us dislike it—my take is it rejects the idea that politics is an attempt to find what's best for the polis, the community, and instead says self-interest is all that matters. One friend, a capitalist feminist, defended the saying and, as an example, claimed the disproportionate number of