Reading List: January 8, 2017
Sunday brings critiques of the system and the movement.
First, Brian Sonenstein of Shadowproof continues his great series on prisons in the US. In this article, he delves into how a private prison in Mississippi refused to fix the problems that led to a deadly riot in 2012.
Inspectors argued the contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons was written to encourage innovation and efficiency in prison management, but in reality, vague language left important aspects up to the discretion of the contractor, CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America).CoreCivic intentionally left positions vacant to reduce costs and under-staffed the facility, which is a well-known practice at private prisons because it allows companies to reduce their overhead and increase profits. Five high-paying and important healthcare positions were not filled.
Speaking of refusing to fix problems, leaked audio provided by Al Masdar News‘ Leith Madal shows that the Obama administration allowed ISIS to grow in Syria so as to cause Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s problems to mushroom in the war torn country.
In addition to admitting that he pushed for intervention in Syria, John Kerry admitted that the U.S. watched ISIS grow from afar in order to force Assad to negotiate with them; however, it would later backfire, as he welcomed Russian intervention against the terrorist group.
And at Viewpoint, Asad Haider posits that articles like the one recently written by Think Progress‘ Ned Resnikoff are less about policy and change, and more about the virtues of whiteness.
What Ned Resnikoff demonstrates is that white guilt has a dark side, which I propose labeling “white purity.” It is a kind of ideology of racial hygiene which embraces multiculturalism and diversity, but attempts to eliminate undesirable elements from the white identity itself.From the perspective of white purity, there are good whites. They have college degrees, listen to NPR, and have many POC friends. But unfortunately there also are bad whites. They’re bad because they probably voted for Donald Trump. But it gets worse. They listen to country music and eat factory farmed meat. They are offensively overweight, and go to church instead of yoga on Sundays. Most disgusting of all, they work in dirty manual labor jobs and have a petty fixation on making more money, unaware that at Harvard an English major of color is being forced to endure the trauma of reading Huckleberry Finn.The whole thing gets more complicated because there are a few other bad whites who shouldn’t be bad whites, like Mark Lilla or Todd Gitlin. Despite their good educations and their incomes, they fail to embrace white purity. Instead, they advocate returning to the white politics of the 1930s and 1940s, when a benevolent white president secured a welfare state for his fellow whites.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.