In his 1956 book The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills painted a disturbing picture of U.S. society in which a small group of people at the heads of corporations, government, and the military exercised increasing control over important decisions affecting the country and its citizenry. In this episode of Ear to the Pavement, we talk to sociologist Mark Mizruchi, author of The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, about how Mills' classic has held up over time, and what light might it shed on the current crisis of inequality in the United States in which three men - Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett - own as much wealth as the bottom half of Americans.

How today's politically ineffectual billionaire CEOs make the corporate elites of the 1950s look like moderate pragmatists.

Ear to the Pavement is a podcast about radical urban social movements. We feature interviews with people who are thinking, writing, working, and organizing on the front lines of transformative urban planning and policy.

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In episode 25, the third installment in our Deconstructing Feminism series, Allison and author and activist Yasmin Nair discuss "The Right to Sex" by Amia Srinivasan, situating it in relation to Kyla Schuller's "The Trouble With White Women" and Rafia Zakaria's "Against White Feminism," books discussed in the series' previous two episodes. Throughout the discussion, Nair continually touches on issues of hierarchy and deference in the publishing world, arguing that an awareness of such dynamics is important in any feminist analysis.

Yasmin Nair: https://yasminnair.com/
"The Right to Sex": https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374721039/therighttosex
Amia Srinivasan: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/professor-amia-srinivasan
Kyla Schuller: https://www.kylaschuller.org/
Rafia Zakaria: https://www.rafiazakaria.com/

Related links to Nair's writing on White feminism, trauma feminism, and the politics of publishing:
The Perils of Trauma Feminism (Current Affairs): https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/12/the-perils-of-trauma-feminism
Nair on books and publishing: https://yasminnair.com/category/book-reviews/

Deconstructing Feminism: Yasmin Nair on The Right to Sex

Episode 24 is part two of Allison's conversation with writer and activist Yasmin Nair, about White Feminism, and about two books on the topic: "The Trouble With White Women" by Kyla Schuller, and "Against White Feminism" by Rafia Zakaria. This episode zeroes in on these authors' treatment of the phenomenon of the White female Trump voter as a touchstone for contemporary intersectional feminist analysis. For more background on the history of Whiteness studies, see "The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson.

Yasmin Nair: https://yasminnair.com/
Kyla Schuller: https://www.kylaschuller.org/
Rafia Zakaria: https://www.rafiazakaria.com/
"The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson: https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/

Deconstructing Feminism: Yasmin Nair on White Feminism, Part II

Episode 23 is the first in a new series with writer and activist Yasmin Nair, about contemporary feminist books. We begin the series with an examination of two recent titles: "The Trouble With White Women" by Kyla Schuller, and "Against White Feminism" by Rafia Zakaria. While Schuller's and Zakaria's common call for the dismantling of White feminism is, as Nair states, "interesting and necessary," each of these books also contains its own distinct set of pitfalls, a closer analysis of which sheds light on the complicated and troubling issues arising at the intersection of modern-day American feminism, antiracism, academia, and publishing. For more background on the history of Whiteness studies, see "The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson.

Yasmin Nair: https://yasminnair.com/
Kyla Schuller: https://www.kylaschuller.org/
Rafia Zakaria: https://www.rafiazakaria.com/
"The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson: https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/

Deconstructing Feminism: Yasmin Nair on White Feminism, Part I

In episode 22 of "Ear to the Pavement" - the first in a new series about the American South - Allison talks with Professor Adolph Reed, Jr. about his new book, "The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives," published in 2022 by Verso. In the book, Reed speaks as a member of the last generation with a living memory of the Jim Crow order, offering a corrective to our increasingly caricatured notions of what the order actually was. By weaving together his own personal stories of growing up under Jim Crow with his signature political analysis, Reed shows us that it was the stuff of ordinary, everyday life that held the system together.

Adolph Reed, Jr.: https://live-sas-www-polisci.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/adolph-reed
"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives": https://www.versobooks.com/books/3945-the-south

Adolph Reed, Jr. on "The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives"

The expectation of radical self-sufficiency is a hallmark of the neoliberal U.S. economy in the early 21st century, and the arts are no exception. The rise of the discourse and practice of "musical entrepreneurship" within the classical music field is a case in point. In episode 21 of "Ear to the Pavement", Allison speaks with musicologist Marianna Ritchey about about her book, "Composing Capital," which looks critically at the neoliberalization of musical labor, and the broader questions it raises about what art is for, who gets to produce it and under what conditions, and how the arts serve different political ideologies.

Marianna Richey: https://www.umass.edu/music/member/marianna-ritchey
"Composing Capital": https://www.powells.com/book/composing-capital-9780226640235

How today's politically ineffectual billionaire CEOs make the corporate elites of the 1950s look like moderate pragmatists.

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