Weekend Reading Jonas will leave streets covered and doors shuttered:

• Populist Anthropology.
• The Cultural History of African Print Fabric.
• Making a Murderer in Uganda.
• How a Nearly Successful Slave Revolt was Intentionally Lost to History.
• Child Sex Workers’ Biggest Threat? The Police.
• Snow Days Under Socialism:

[G]utting public infrastructure wasn’t the only way that neoliberalism brought out the worst that the winter storms had to offer. It was also the speed-up at work, the shredding of social safety nets, and the fracturing and atomization of communities. All of these factors combined to leave people tired, frustrated, isolated, scared, and cold.

Snowstorm after snowstorm was dealt with in more or less the same fashion, while people grew more desperate and more exhausted with each passing week. Workplaces remained open while public transit ground to a halt. Children were given snow days — but not adults.

• The Park Built on Forgotten Ghost Towns.
• Roots and Genes, on DNA and black history.
• The Forgotten History of Native American Slaves.
• “There’s more than one way to read queerness into Mario Kart 64‘s roster.“
• There’s a faster way to get birth control now.
• Stop Whining about the PC Police:

Conflicts around language-use and representation always emerge out of attempts to shift hierarchy. Each incident follows the same general pattern. People with less power demand or request that people with more power moderate their speech or actions. The people with more power use “that’s just being PC” as a rhetorical hedge to reinforce their dominant position. By their very nature, then, efforts to shift language are generally subversive; the backlash, generally regressive. Any attempt to analyze a given incident of “politically correct” action or repression must therefore look not at what’s being demanded, but where power actually lies.

It turns out that agitation for less offensive speech and safe spaces become dangerous to free speech or academic freedom only when powerful, entrenched forces co-opt such movements for their own purposes.