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SINCE THE 2016 ELECTION, there has been a continuous, perhaps unresolvable, debate about whether deepening economic distress or ingrained racism led many whites to back Trump. Seen from the former empire of cotton in the US South, where surplus was extracted from black bodies, and industrial progre…

[...] Working under the auspices of Alabama Correctional Industries (ACI), men and women are paid anywhere from 25 cents to 75 cents an hour for their labors. The humming of the textile looms in these prisons is a point of pride for state business boosters: “Alabama’s state prison system faces a wi…

But to fixate on racial disparities—whether still open or rapidly closing—misses the point. Writing about white political dispositions in an earlier period, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that postbellum working-class and poorer white Americans received “a public and psychological wage,” withheld from Afr…

Embedded in Case and Deaton’s “narrative of deterioration,” then, is a narrative of racial declension. Poorer, non-college-educated black and Hispanics have suffered the same economic weakness without experiencing rising mortality and morbidity

The debate was never in good faith. Democracy was still a decade away; the left was marginal and toothless; the old Francophiles had begun to retire. The three countries of North America signed the treaty with great fanfare. The Mexican economy grew, but not at the pace of the neoliberals’ projecti…