December 8, 2021

Review of: These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class, by Wendy Sanford

I picked up the new book of my college classmate, Wendy Sanford, and immediately found myself plunged into some of the contradictions of my own life. Like me, Wendy came from a wealthy family totally, obliviously, dependent on the “help.” Like me, she grew from taking that arrangement for granted,

Family, Inequality, Racism

July 25, 2021

The Black-White Wage Gap: How Inequality and Monopoly Amplify Racial Discrimination

Black men's wages as a percent of White increased rapidly after World War II, only to level off at a bit over 55% after the 1970s. That's a paradox: If racism causes the Black-White wage gap, how come the gap closed dramatically while Jim Crow laws remained in effect, and

Anti-trust, Inequality, Monopoly, Racism, Wages

October 18, 2016

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie Hochschild, a retired sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley, has spent five years interviewing and becoming friends with Tea Party supporters in Louisiana. As she puts it, she has been trying to climb over the “empathy wall,” to “turn off the alarm bells”, in order to understand how her friends