posts tagged asrace and class

Black Education, Racism, and Class: Reflections from a Charter High School Graduation

by on June 20, 2017

This May I attended the commencement ceremony for a young cousin who was one of 117 graduates from an overwhelmingly black charter high school in a south suburb of Chicago.  Launched in 2010, the school – which I will dub “South Charter High” – was the brainchild of black educators, and working-class and middle-class parents, a fair share of them former Chicagoans displaced from the city by urban redevelopment and a skyrocketing cost of living. 

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Working on the Verge of “Campus Carry”

by on October 11, 2016
One of several nightmarish outcomes of Kansas' swing to the Tea Party Republican right following the presidential election of Barack Obama, the state will soon allow individuals to carry loaded, concealed firearms without a permit or even safety training. Read more →

White Trash, Hillbillies, and Middle-Class Stereotypes

by on September 25, 2016

During election years white people who do not have bachelor’s degrees (the increasingly common definition of “the working class”) become both a somewhat exotic who-knew-they-were-here-and-in-such-large-numbers object of discussion and a target for freewheeling social psychologizing. Thus, it is more than a little refreshing to see two books attempt to tackle the more exotic side of Donald Trump’s beloved “the poorly educated.”

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Why Labor Historians Should Remember Leslie Brown

by on August 12, 2016

Even if you did not know her personally, you should mourn Professor Leslie Brown, who passed away earlier this month. She was many wonderful things, among them an award-winning scholar in African American and women’s history whose first major work – Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South – is one of the best labor histories that I have read and still envy.

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