These readings all meet the 15% rule:

• Clean Water For All.
• Speaking Out of School, on the emotional labor of minority faculty.
• The Dark History of Liberal Reform.
• What Went Wrong? Assessing Obama’s Legacy.
• New Orleans is Done Fighting Water.
• Fear of Screens.
• Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination:

It is not wrong to ask why mainstream Democrats don’t support reparations. But when the question is asked to defend a radical Democrat’s lack of support, it is avoidance. The need for so many (although not all) of Sanders’s supporters to deflect the question, to speak of Hillary Clinton instead of directly assessing whether Sanders’s position is consistent, intelligent, and moral hints at something terrible and unsaid. The terribleness is this: To destroy white supremacy we must commit ourselves to the promotion of unpopular policy. To commit ourselves solely to the promotion of popular policy means making peace with white supremacy.

[…]

The point is not that reparations is not divisive. The point is that anti-racism is always divisive. A left radicalism that makes Clintonism its standard for anti-racism—fully knowing it could never do such a thing in the realm of labor, for instance—has embraced evasion.

• Hortense Powdermaker’s Anthropology.
• The high stakes of Uber and the Gig Economy.
• In Flint, Access to Clean Water is a Reproductive Justice Issue.
• Reconstruction Reading List.
• The Myth of Free Speech.
• Marx: American Alter Ego, some ruminations on Marx in America.
• A Future History of the United States:

[T]o think about American slaves merely as coerced and unpaid laborers is to misunderstand the institution. Slaves weren’t just workers, the Sublettes remind the reader—they were human capital. The very idea that people could be property is so offensive that we tend retroactively to elide the designation, projecting onto history the less-noxious idea of the enslaved worker, rather than the slave as commodity. Mapping 20th-century labor models onto slavery spares us from reckoning with the full consequences of organized dehumanization, which lets us off too easy: To turn people into products means more than not paying them for their work.