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The correlation between economic inequality and both violent and nonviolent crime has been well documented. However, poverty and neoliberal retrenchment have contributed to mass incarceration in other ways that are often obscured by a tendency to focus on racial disparities alone. While racism cert…

In the early 1960s, many civil rights leaders were clear that antidiscrimination policies alone were incapable of closing the economic divide separating blacks and whites. Though Coates claims that A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin — the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Fr…

While it is safe to assume that most southern farm owners in the 1930s were racist, the fact that farm-owning proprietors generally opposed SSA coverage for farm laborers — black and white alike — as well as for themselves makes clear that their motives owed less to the “original sin of racism” tha…

[...] if Coates merits recognition for introducing the ill effects of specific policies to a popular audience, his insistence that race is a force that operates independently from political economy leads him to the erroneous conclusion that modern liberalism’s failures are owed to a refusal to ackn…

post-racialism is in step with postwar liberalism’s tendency to treat racial inequities as if they exist in a world apart from the economic processes that generate them. Coates’s conceptualization of racism as the engine of history not only blinds him to this fact, but his commitment to racial onto…