1. This New Study Explains Why White People Deny Their Privilege (Mic)
Nothing that new in this new study, but still worth noting:
It turns out, white privilege may endure not because white Americans uniformly hold racist beliefs about others, but more likely is based on their beliefs about themselves. When people are “faced with evidence that their group benefits from privilege,” the study’s authors write, they not only fail to take responsibility for such benefits, but find those claims “threatening” and even “claim hardships to manage this threat.” Essentially, white people may accept that “group-level inequity” exists but deny that they personally benefit from that privilege in order to protect their own self-conception.
As Son of Baldwin wrote on Facebook: “Black people must be incredible scientists. We knew this shit without a study.”
2. It’s not Dixie’s fault (Washington Post)
It’s reassuring for Northerners to think that the country’s problems are rooted down South. But pointing our fingers at Dixie — and, by implication, reinforcing the myth of Northern innocence — comes at a cost.
3. The Servitude Bubble (Medium)
Collin Brooke sent this out via Rhetsy last week. Umair Haque suggests that the “sharing economy” is a bit of a misnomer and suggests instead that we are in a “servitude bubble”—an extension/intensification of the service economy that relies on deskilled labor and a few folks getting rich. An interesting discussion of “techne” as that which enhances skill and promotes freedom and “tech” as that “stuff that…hails taxis…organizes butlers…automatically calls dogwalkers.”
4. Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates Whilst Snuggled Deep Within My Butthole (Jezebel)
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book Between the World and Me came out. It’s a great read about systemic racism, the historic and current pillaging of black bodies, and how White people’s myth of the American Dream is built on the bodies of black people. Written in the epistolary tradition as a letter to his son, the book is heartbreaking. After reading it this weekend, I’m not sure whether I’m flabbergasted at how David Brooks could write this response to the book, or just not surprised because it’s quite in line with Brooks’s asinine writing. But the best (or more accurately, my favorite) response to Brooks I’ve read is this Jezebel post, which rewrites Brooks’s column from Brooks’s favorite location, deep within his own butthole.
Other recent discussions of Coates’s book I’ve run across:
- The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates (NY Mag)
- The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates (Washington Post)
5. Born this way? Society, sexuality and the search for the ‘gay gene’ (Guardian)
For once, an account in a mainstream paper that has a fairly reasoned approach to biologism and gay identity—and discusses Foucault at that! (Simon Copeland might be becoming one of my favorite queers in mainstream media. Last year, he wrote in defense of understanding sexuality as a choice.)
