What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to “uplift the race” by correcting the “bad” traits of the black poor has evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama. In an era marked by rising inequality and declining economic mobility for most Americans—but particularly for black Americans—the politics of respectability works to accommodate neoliberalism.
I’m going to focus on a distinctive landscape of ruins, an amazing, dreadful landscape that came to define the South Bronx, and for many people to define New York, for the last decades of the twentieth century. Those ruins were one of New York’s great negatives. I want to try to do what Hegel says: look the negative in the face.
2013 was a big year for Dissent. To celebrate, we’re highlighting a few of the year’s biggest hits.
If tomorrow the GOP agreed to everything in the agenda that Barack Obama laid out in his February State of the Union address, the progress in dealing with the dramatic changes in the economic prospects of most Americans would be close to zero.
Sarah and Michelle look back over the year in labor: the good news and the grim, the under-the-radar stories and the big wins. They also look forward to next year and make some (hopeful) predictions. Sarah and Michelle also bring you up to date on the latest labor news, including unexpected unions gaining a toehold in fast food.
Socialist Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle City Council in November 2013 made national news, a kind of “man bites dog” story that the media found shocking and irresistible. In fact, the United States has a long tradition of municipal socialism. One hundred years ago, about 1,200 socialists held public office in 340 cities.
Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error speaks directly to the experiences of public school teachers who are tired of being labeled as failures for their inability to control the outcomes of standardized tests.
Readers of Dissent are unlikely to be newcomers to Wisconsin’s recent political saga. With oddball events unfolding week by week, however, they may easily have lost track. American conservatives have not forgotten.
Sarah and Michelle talk about Washington’s epic fail on unemployment benefits, rampant labor violations by companies operating on federal contracts, Chris Hayes and the union drive at an NBC subsidiary, and a recap of last week’s #LowPayisNotOkay protests. Plus voices from 32BJ and the Alliance for Quality Education.
“Sixty-five years after its founding,” Ari Shavit writes in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, “Israel has returned to its core questions. . . . Why Israel? What is Israel? Will Israel?” To answer these questions, he goes far beyond the occupation, touching on many issues that get to the core of Israeli identity.
What exactly did the recent Third Plenum reveal about Xi Jinping’s strategy for dealing with the big issues facing China in the nine years left in his time heading the Chinese Communist Party? Initially, the consensus seemed to be that …
Ravel Gonçalves Mendonça is a 17-year-old beach volleyball phenom from Rio. He is currently training with Brazil’s national team at its state-of-the-art facility. But his country’s preparation for the Olympics has eliminated what used to be Ravel’s home.
As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare’s insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade.
In memory of Nelson Mandela, we present the following selections from Dissent essays on South African politics over the last thirty years.
In the Fall 2013 issue, Hans Kundnani wrote about the German Social Democrats’ struggle to challenge Angela Merkel’s approach to the Eurozone crisis. Read his update on the new grand coalition here, and read the original article here.
