Sublime

The expanding polarization has made it painfully clear that something is not quite right.

From 1880 to 1980, the income gap between residents of different states closed steadily each year. Today, that convergence has dissolved almost entirely.27 Ganong and Shoag estimate that America’s midcentury mobility accounted for more than a third of its midcentury drop in income inequality.28 Now it is gone. This is the quiet destruction of an an

Ray Oldenburg,

In the last decades of the twentieth century, as the justice system was adopting a set of abrasive policies that would swell police forces and fuel the prison boom, it was also leaving more and more policing responsibilities to citizens without a badge and a gun.3 What about the pawnshop owner who sold the gun? Isn’t he partially responsible for th

Men would have to make sacrifices for the sake of the system: acknowledging that some present employees would not score high enough on his tests for the jobs they held, he had a simple solution—such employees would have to accept demotions and pay cuts. Unnecessary employees, he said, would have to be “eliminated.”

In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would com

The second potential tool for hampering unbridled duplication of uses is what I call staunchness of public buildings. By this I mean that public and quasi-public bodies should adopt, for their properties, a policy somewhat like Charles Abrams’ private policy for his property on Eighth Street. Abrams combats the excessive duplication of restaurants

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

It is on each of us who pass as white to identify how these advantages shape us, not to deny them wholescale.