2013

Resisting Post-Oppression Narratives

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Class exploitation and racial discrimination has diminished in popularity as an explanation for our society’s continuing social inequalities. In its stead, a “post-oppression” ideology and rhetoric has developed, which leaves “distortions” (such as race-based disparities) to the market alone to resolve.

2013

Our Issues Entwine: LGBTQ Aging and Economic Justice

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The aging and LGBTQ advocacy fields often propose policy solutions that are too narrow to address the complexity of how all marginalized people—including heterosexual people of color such as my parents, members of the LGBTQ community, and more—experience the process of aging. We need social transformations that address the intersecting forms of oppression that older people face.

2013

Identity Politics is Not Enough: Why the Left Needs Universalism to Survive

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We need identity politics: we need voices that speak for the pain of particular experiences and situations, and for the absences in pretended universals. But let us not mistake those voices for the kind of comprehensive understanding that alone can contest the illegitimate and often destructive power that rules this country and much of the globe.

2013

Intersectional Politics: Recovering Our Interdependent Wholeness

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In today’s world, our lives are systematically fragmented and our relationships are transactional. When we try to put the pieces back together, we call it an intersectional analysis. However, the heart of the matter involves more than identifying intersections between different forms of oppression: it involves healing a broken vision and recovering our wholeness.

2013

In Defense of Identity Politics

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The great promise of identity politics is its ability to raise powerful consciousness among oppressed groups of people and also build bridges among those groups. When that occurs, the results have the power to create more permanent alliances that challenge the egregious injustices that still pervade American society and politics.

Economy/Poverty/Wealth

Fear, Safety, Control, and Resistance: Shifting the Dialogue on Policing

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Recent events have stirred up new conversations about policing, crime, and violence among white people not targeted by policing. I hope that we can use this moment to examine our beliefs and negotiate how we can participate in eliminating police harassment and violence to begin building safer communities. To facilitate this, I have listed five common remarks that I have heard from other white people, followed by a response.

Articles

Toward a Non-Binary Discussion of Race: Thoughts on Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

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The killing of Trayvon Martin moved me, like so many other Black people, to my core. Americans talk a lot about “race” but are bound up in a highly specious construction of it. We need to have real discussion about our changing ethnoracial order, including religious division, color, class, and imperialism, if we are to survive as a society.

2013

No Borders: Struggling for a Global Commons

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What distinguishes a No Borders politics from other immigrant-rights approaches is their refusal to settle for “fairer” immigration laws (higher numbers, access to legal statuses, and so on). Within a No Borders politics, it is understood that the border-control practices of national states not only reflect people’s unequal rights (e.g., whose movements are deemed to be legitimate and whose are not) but also produce this inequality. Thus, their signal demand is for every person to have the freedom to move and, in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the concomitant freedom to not be moved (i.e., to stay).