Ta-Nehisi Coates Doesn’t Understand Racism

Ta-Nehisi Coates recently attacked Bernie Sanders for refusing to support reparations for black Americans. Coates has been trying to put race reparations on the American political agenda for a while. Coates knows a great deal about the many horrible, immoral ways that the United States government has exploited and expropriated its black population throughout its history. But Coates is a journalist, not a political theorist, and over the last few days I’ve identified some elementary problems in the way he conceptualizes racism as a political force that indicate that there is a lot of political theory he just has not read.

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Paul Krugman is Wrong about the Democratic Primary

As some of you may know, I am an avid reader of Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman’s blog. He is a stalwart opponent of austerity and has written some brilliant pieces on it. However, I find myself in disagreement with his latest column about the 2016 Democratic Party primary election in the United States, where Krugman argues that because Bernie Sanders’ single payer proposal is unlikely to be passed by congress it is a distraction rather than a meaningful point of distinction between himself and Hillary Clinton.

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Why the Republican Establishment Cannot Recover This Time

For the republicans, this has been a weird election. For most of the race, the leaders have all been rebel candidates deeply unacceptable to the party establishment–Trump, Cruz, Carson–and with just a couple weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, there’s no sign of this changing. If you’d asked me in the summer, I would have told you that sure, a few extremely kooky republican candidates might spend a little time making ephemeral runs in first place, but sooner or later an establishment candidate has to win out, just like Mitt Romney did in 2012 and John McCain did in 2008. Herman Cain had his month in the sun, but no one ever took him seriously, right? Sooner or later everyone converges around a Jeb Bush. It looks like my summer prediction isn’t going to come true, and like any good politics PhD student, that has me wondering what I got wrong. Over the past month I’ve been pondering this, and I think I’ve figured it out.

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The Oregon Rebels are Guilty of Sedition, Not Terrorism

In Oregon, members of Cliven Bundy’s paramilitary organization have seized and occupied the headquarters building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which belongs to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency. Many people are calling Bundy’s rebels “terrorists” and accusing the media of treating them differently because they are white. Their point is well-intentioned–it is true that violent criminals from Middle Eastern backgrounds are more readily presumed to be terrorists by the press. But the argument is ill-applied to this particular case. The law is very clear–the Oregon rebels are guilty of sedition, not terrorism.

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Chicago Protesters Had Good Reasons to Be Upset Long Before Laquan McDonald

In Chicago, people are taking to the streets in response to the shooting of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by officer Jason Van Dyke, apparently for brandishing a knife and refusing to put it down when asked to do so:

Van Dyke has been charged with first degree murder. So far, the demonstrations have been peaceful and riots have not broken out. In the wake of a horrible incident like this, it’s important for us to remember that racism goes well beyond individual killings–there has long been statistical data documenting systemic racial inequalities in Chicago. These statistics don’t get as much attention from the media and from protesters because they’re not as emotionally gripping as a killing, but the suffering they demonstrate is every bit as real and much greater in scope.

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