I really hope you have had the chance to pick up Sunday’s NYT for the 1619 project. Matthew Desmond has annoyed me–why do we have to have to sociologists from Harvard explain that evictions are brutal when women, especially BIPOC women, who have been evicted have been saying this decade after decade? But his essay in 1619 is beautifully written and takes our eyes to where they have to go in understanding the US as it was and is–and why our social policy environment is so very toxic:
“If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.”
Please purchase a copy of the NYT and give yourself time to read the essays, and please also note the incredible work of