• Haiti: The Second Occupation.
• A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-Year Campaign to Roll Back the Voting Rights Act.
• WWII was Already Won When We Dropped the Bomb – and the Generals Knew It.
• Drug Dogs are the Perfect Way to Get Around the Fourth Amendment.
• How Railroads and Highways Divide America’s Cities.
• Uber’s Phantom Cabs.
• The Hell you Say, on the fight for free speech:

No doubt many liberals have grown increasingly sensitive to the uses and abuses of language. This might be a consequence of previously marginalized groups demanding respect, or it might have something to do with technological change, as the atomized Internet age gives way to the non-stop commentary of the social-media age. And it may be the case that this focus on language will prove, in the long run, unhelpful to the progressive movement. But it is hard to see how, as Powers argues, “the left is killing free speech” merely by paying too much attention to it. Last month, speaking about criminal-justice reform, President Obama issued twin exhortations. “We should not be tolerating rape in prison,” he said. “And we shouldn’t be making jokes about it in our popular culture.” To someone like Powers, this might have sounded faintly oppressive: the President telling citizens what jokes not to tell. Yet our discourse is shaped by innumerable taboos. (Just think of all the things one shouldn’t say about members of the military.) Certainly, some new taboos are emerging, even as some older ones fade away, but no one with Internet access will find it easy to claim that, in general, our speech is more inhibited than it used to be. Taboos discourage some speech, but the system of taboos is also maintained through speech. If you say the unsayable, you might well be shamed—and that shaming can have consequences—but you will not be arrested. Mostly, what inhibits speech is the fear of being spoken about.

Earlier this year, Powers took part in a debate over the proposition that “liberals are stifling intellectual diversity on campus.” One of the people on the other side was Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism. He cited the case of Robert J. Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, who was invited to deliver the commencement address at Haverford College last year, but declined in the face of protests; students had demanded that he apologize for the actions of U.C.B. police officers who arrested seven students during a 2011 demonstration. Powers considers Birgeneau the victim of a “campaign of intolerance,” but Johnston sees him as a perpetrator. “Birgeneau, an administrator who presided over the beating and arrest of student protesters, is portrayed as a free-speech martyr,” he said. “The students who just wanted to talk to him about that are portrayed as his oppressors.” Johnston conceded that “stifling” was worrisome, but insisted that the true culprits were administrators—liberal, perhaps, in political outlook, but motivated merely by “opposition to disruptiveness and clamor.” These days, just about everyone claims to be on the side of free speech.

• Cops Lie.
• New Stonewall Movie Continues Proud Hollywood Tradition of Erasing Minorities from History.
• Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBose and Cecil the Lion.
• Facebook’s Algorithmic Triggering.
• How Development Institutions are Financing Land Grabs in DRC.
• Healthy Food is Blander than Ever:

All the good stuff we grow — tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce — has gotten continually more bland. This has been measured. They have become diluted of nutrients, as well. As we selected crops for agronomic traits like yield, shelf life and disease resistant, we never selected for flavor. And we lost flavor as a result. It’s reverse evolutionary pressure.

Simultaneously, while those flavors were being lost at the farm level, we started producing them in factories and adding them to all sorts of things. We created flavors that were out of context. For tens of thousands of years, the only place we could get the taste of orange was from an orange. Then we created orange flavoring and suddenly we had orange pops, ice cream, candy. These flavored foods deliver deliciousness and calories, but they don’t deliver a diversity of nutrients.

• As the Met Abandons Blackface, a Look at the History of African Americans in Opera.
• How Mad Men Rode the Carousel of the Past into Television History.
• Please Don’t Have Sex with Robots.
• What did the Ebola Crisis Teach Us about Liberia?
• We Love a Good Personal Responsibility Message – When the Audience is Black.
• A Real Pygmies Experiences: Uganda’s Batwa Perform a Past Life.

Weekend Reading wine pairings.

• Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley Failed Their #BlackLivesMatter Test, with a side of
• Why Progressives Are Fighting Over Bernie Sanders and Race, and
• Angus Johnston’s tweets on student organizing and race, and
• The Long, Repressed History of Black Leftism.

• The End of Capitalism Has Begun & Workers Aren’t Disappearing.
• Police Killings By State, and Gary Younge’s Farewell to America.
• The Pruitt-Igoe Highrise Defined Urban America, but Levittown Defines Its Suburbs.

• A University Divided: Separate and Unequal on UC Berkeley
• Only the Wealthy Get a Good Public Education in DC

etc.

• Do-Gooders, Do-No-Harm, on activism and international conflicts.
• Kate Hudson Kept Me in the Closet.
• Design, Aesthetics, and the AK-47.
• How to Talk to Babies about Marxist Theory.
• The Stray Dogs that Became Soviet Space Heroes.

• Black Lives Matter: A Critique of Anthropology.
• The Dominican Time Bomb.
• Sierra Leone’s Rich and Powerful are Breaking Ebola Burial Rules.
• How Pop Culture’s White Supremacists Help Us Feel Good About Ourselves.
• Skull Robbers: How Celebrity Culture Lost Its Head.
• Abortion is a Necessary Social Good.
• The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest:

[I]n a 1996 article in Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan [tsunami] to its parent—and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.

Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. “I think it was at nighttime that the land shook,” Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history, “They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived.” A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.

It does not speak well of European-Americans that such stories counted as evidence for a proposition only after that proposition had been proved.

• Confronting New Madrid.
• Collective Punishment of African American Communities – a database.
• Just Don’t Do It, on policing women’s speech.
• The Party of Jackson vs. The Party of Obama.
• The Myth of the Academic Lottery.
• Feedbags, on Faebook’s new algorithmic changes:

there were already innumerable levers at our disposal to alter Facebook’s algorithm and its interpretation of us. Like this post, view that profile, visit this third-party site while logged into Facebook, etc. We didn’t know what the exact effects of these would be, and we still don’t know what the exact effects of the new “controls” will have on our News Feeds. You don’t control an algorithm by feeding more information to it; you teach it to control you better.

Facebook has always deferred to users because that deference allows it to gain more information that can be presumed more accurate than what it can merely infer. And it has never wanted to tell us what to find meaningful; it wants only to inscribe Facebook as the best place in which to discover our sense of meaning. The control Facebook’s algorithms impose is not what to think but where to think it.

• We Can End Poverty, But At What Cost?
• Tito’s Bunker: Remembering a Futuristic Past.
• When the Teacher’s Edition is Wrong.
• The Accountability Landscape in Eastern DRC [pdf].
• The Logic of Effective Altruism.

You can read these links anywhere and everywhere.

• Gay Rights in the U.S. – state by state.
• Zeezus Does the Firing ‘Round Hurr, Zandria F. Robinson gives her side of the story.
• John Locke Against Freedom.
• The Internet That Was (And Still Could Be).
• How to Stop Mass Incarceration.
• Prisons are Man-Made… They Can Be Unmade.
• Capitalism: A History of Violence.
• Cruel and All-Too-Usual:

In a wealthier Michigan county, kids convicted of minor offenses are almost always sentenced to community service, like helping out at the local science center. Doug Mullkoff, a criminal defense attorney in Ann Arbor, told me that prison in such circumstances is “virtually unheard of.” But Jamie is from Detroit, and in January 2012, she was sent to the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, a prison that holds inmates convicted of crimes like first-degree homicide. From this point onward, her world was largely governed by codes and practices and assumptions designed for adult criminals.

Jamie is 20 now, but her soft brown eyes make her seem younger. When she first came to prison, women old enough to be her mother told her she was cute and promised to take care of her. “They rub on you and stuff, I can’t stand it,” she said. In the seven months before her 18th birthday, prison records show that Jamie was housed with at least three adult cellmates, including one in her 50s who had a history of cocaine possession. Jamie said she was also around adults in the showers and the yard. She had a bunkmate who did drugs she had never been around before, “something you snort.”

In this environment, Jamie found it hard to stay out of trouble. And when trouble came, she didn’t know how to explain herself to the guards. According to Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), Jamie “failed in every instance” to meet good-behavior standards that under Michigan law allow certain inmates to have their records scrubbed clean after they serve their sentences. In June 2012, Jamie’s special status was revoked and she was resentenced to up to five years in prison for her original crime.

• How Goes the Hunt for Joseph Kony?
• Notes from an Undercover Uber Driver.
• On Tanzania’s Goat Races.
• Australia’s Refugee and Asylum Policies are The Worst.
• A New Right Grounded in the Long History of Marriage.
• Justice Roberts’ Four Cultures with Traditional Marriage are Anything But.
• The Depths of Poverty in the Deep South.
• Bull Shipping: On Chilean Mothers and California Gold.

Chilean capitalists were—then as now—gifted at spotting and exploiting opportunities. Many found that setting up shops in San Francisco was more profitable than searching for gold. Some of the richer Chileans who came to California brought theirpeones with them—dependent workers who claimed sites in their own names but worked them for their patrón (often for very little pay). That didn’t sit well with some American prospectors, nor did the fact that foreigners had claimed some of the best sites.

In December 1849, a group of Iowans decided to target and expel foreigners from sites they wanted to work. Intimidation tactics worked in some cases, but Chilean miners proved generally hard to intimidate. The Iowans claimed that the Chilean “peons” were slaves in a free state, and got a Judge Collier to issue an eviction order: The Chileans had eight days to vacate the site or be forcibly evicted. The Chilenos coolly informed the Iowans that they had never voted for Judge Collier and therefore didn’t recognize his authority. And what started out as a conflict in the mines of the Wild West devolved (or escalated) into a battle over paperwork: Finding a judge of their own, the Chileans asked him to issue a warrant for the Americans’ arrest, petitioned for authorization to personally make the arrests, and obtained it. They invaded the American camp, and managed to legally take more than a dozen extremely surprised Americans prisoner.

• In the Regents We Trust? How Autonomy Put Tenure on the Chopping Block.
• Those 21 Months of Emergency, on India under oppression.
• The Bloody Legacy of Indian Partition.
• Preying on Prisoners, on sexual abuse in Texas prisons.
• Puerto Rico’s Crisis.
• Trickle-Down Economics is a Joke.
• The Social Construction of Race:

Africans existed in many different conditions in the colonies. Some Africans were free; there are even instances of Africans bringing lawsuits against Europeans — then called “Christians” — and winning. There are records of Africans adopting Christian babies. It’s only later that language changes from “free” and “slave” (or “African” and “Christian”) to “white” and “black.” Africans were available for enslavement in ways that other people were not.

For the first time in human history, the color of one’s skin had a political significance. It never had a political significance before. Now there was a reason to assign a political significance to dark skin — it’s an ingenious way to brand someone as a slave. It’s a brand that they can never wash off, that they can never erase, that they can never run away from. There’s no way out. That’s the ingeniousness of using skin color as a mark of degradation, as a mark of slavery.

• “We Were Never Meant to Survive,” a Response to Charleston.
• Take Down the Confederate Flag – Now.
• A Migrant’s Journey, from Syria to Sweden.
• Is Africa Really Rising?
• That Time the Middle East Exploded – and Nixon was Drunk.
• The Post-Ownership Society.
• The Agency, a crazy look at a Russian internet trolling agency.
• How American Cities ‘Disconnect’ Youth:

While disconnection rates vary from city to city, some of the biggest chasms are found between predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods—neighborhoods within the same metro area. In Chicago, for example—a city simultaneously known for its gang violence and its prestigious art museums— only 8 percent of the city’s white youth are disconnected, compared to roughly a quarter of its black youth. Youth and young adults aged 16 to 24 in Chicago who live in mostly black neighborhoods, as well as their counterparts in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, are ten times more likely to be disconnected than their peers living in majority-white neighborhoods in the very same cities.

The cities with high black-disconnection rates also have deeply segregated school systems. Less than 10 percent of kids enrolled in Chicago Public Schools are white, and the statistics are similar in D.C.(12 percent) and Philadelphia (14 percent). Unsurprisingly, the report parallels similar phenomena in school systems that, despite the six-decade-old Brown v. Board of Education decision,remain segregated to this day—often a byproduct of housing policies and trends.

• Chronicling Los Angeles’ History, Menu by Menu.
• Don’t Let the Police Teach Your Kid a Lesson.
• U.N. Peacekeeping and Transactional Sex.
• Dreams Deferred in Baltimore.
• Why Teachers are Fleeing Arizona in Droves.
• Why Does Reddit Love to Hate?
• Two pieces on the Dominican Republic’s expulsion of Haitians.
• How Section 8 Became a Slur:

Most of these early projects were built for whites, and whites of a particular kind: the “barely poor,” as Vale puts it — the upwardly mobile working class, with fathers working in factory jobs. Housing agencies required tenant families to have stable work and married parents. Children out of wedlock were rejected. Housing authority managers visited prospective tenants, often unannounced, to check on the cleanliness of their homes and their housekeeping habits.

“The idea — although people didn’t tend to voice it explicitly — was that you could be too poor for public housing,” Vale says. In many cities, the truly poor remained in the tenements.

[…]

By the 1960s, the tenants living in public housing began to grow more deeply poor and, particularly in big cities, much less white, in large part thanks to another set of active housing policies pushed next by the federal government.

In cities like Chicago and Detroit, public housing “became a black program,” says the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, “because the Federal Housing Administration created a different program for whites, which was a single-family suburban program.”

Readings on racism, policing, incarceration, and other forms of violence.

• The Racial History of America’s Swimming Pools.
• Summer Heat, on dreading summer and the police violence that comes with it.
• The Brief and Tragic Life of Kalief Browder.
• Negotiations from the Door of the Cell.
• Officer Involved – photographs of sites of police violence.
• Old World Order, on European policing and lack of benevolence.
• Decolonizing the University in South Africa.
• Reform, Relapse, Repeat: The Ongoing Beat of the Prison Industrial Complex.
• Anger, Resentment, and Love: Fuelling Resurgent Struggle in Indigenous America.
• The War on Thugs:

To view someone as a political equal is an act of respect and empathy. The decades-long growth in black incarceration rates represents a failure of empathy. How could rational people committed to liberal ideals allow such an obvious violation of those ideals to persist? How can such manifest social contradictions be so easily tolerated? Those questions have the characteristic feel of philosophical problems.

To understand what’s happened with incarceration in America, you must examine the concepts of propaganda and ideology, especially the kind of propaganda that is most prevalent in liberal democratic societies, which I call undermining propaganda. Undermining propaganda consists of arguments that employ a cherished political ideal in the service of a goal that undermines that very ideal. When it works, we do not even notice the contradiction. Ideology conceals the contradictions of propaganda….

Battles about the putative link between crime and race stretch back more than a century in the sociological literature, to Ida B. Wells and Du Bois. The story is masterfully told in Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s 2010 book, The Condemnation of Blackness (Harvard University Press), in which he shows how white social scientists used race to explain problems among blacks, while appealing to socioeconomic causes to explain the very same problems among whites. Mass incarceration yields many other instances of manipulative expertise.

Readings on higher education, tenure, and student-teacher dynamics.

• Kids These Days.
• Tenure and (In)Justice.
• “A student came to my office hours to complain about the difficulties of understanding her own oppression.”
• Students Aren’t the Problem.
• Liberal professors shouldn’t be scared of their liberal students.
• Why professors shouldn’t let student complaints drive their teaching:

My students’ discomfort with me is especially clear when I teach “general” courses — courses that are not explicitly about people of color. It is not uncommon for students to accuse me of diminishing the quality of their education when I teach classes like this. For example, when I taught an honors writing class, I included two — just two! — reading assignments by nonwhite authors. At the end of the term, a significant percentage of student evaluations complained that the class was skewed because it unjustifiably prioritized African-American authors.

All of my students, regardless of the identity categories they embraced, had been taught their entire lives that real literature is written by white people. Naturally, they felt they were being cheated by this strange professor’s “agenda.”

Readings on everything else.

• The Anti-Poverty Experiment.
• The Forgotten Massacres of Indonesia’ Communists.
• Why was the Nepali Earthquake so Devastating? State Centralization.
• Western Sahara is Africa’s Last Colony.
• (Neo)Imperial Delusions in the Middle East:

More troubling, however, are Kaplan’s claims about supposedly artificial borders and the “order” brought by colonial rule. The artificial bordersargument is a common myth that sadly continues to pervade policy discussions of the Middle East. Kaplan simply regurgitates the claim that theSykes-Picot Agreement was arbitrarily drawn, and did not conform to sectarian or national realities on the ground, implying that the “artificial” borders drawn by the agreement have contributed to the sectarian strife we see today.

Complaints about artificial states imply that borders can ever be natural. While nationalist elites may like to portray borders as natural to their kin groups, around the world, states were formed through social processes involving conflict and negotiation to create the borders we see today. That’s true whether those borders have expanded, contracted, or been drawn by outsiders or insiders, but in all cases they are socially constructed and no more artificial than any other borders. To hold up some imperial divisions (like Ottoman borders) as “natural” while calling more recent colonial borders “artificial” greatly confuses the extent to which all borders are drawn through social processes, politics and violence.

Moreover, supra-national entities, like the United Arab Republic in the Middle East and the Mali Federation in West Africa, fell apart under local and national political constraints. This suggests that, counter to Kaplan’s claims, national distinctions matter, even when colonial powers drew the borders of what became postcolonial states. And Marc Lynch and others have recently demonstrated the ways in which national identity remains highly salient in the Middle East. Kaplan’s “artificial” nations can in fact show a high degree of coherence and nationalist sentiment, even in the face of ongoing political, social and economic turmoil.