Given the disparities between the lifespans of whites, African Americans, Native Americans and other groups, it might seem to be sensible to gear medicine along racial lines. But sociologist Leslie Hinkson argues that it represents a dangerous turn in science and healthcare. She discusses race, biology, and debt. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson (eds.), Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine University of Minnesota Press, 2017

The post The Pitfalls of Race-Based Medicine appeared first on KPFA.

What role did slavery play in the story of U.S. capitalism? Does the fact that slavery wasn’t rooted in wage labor mean that it wasn’t a form of capitalist practice? Caitlin Rosenthal offers a definition of capitalism and shares her understanding of how commodification, and the power to impose it, operated under slavery.

Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management Harvard University Press, 2019 (paper)

The post Slavery, Capitalism, and the Power to Commodify appeared first on KPFA.

The United States fancies itself an exceptional nation, and in terms of its media system, it’s right: the US has the most commercialized press of any advanced industrial country, with the least support for public media. So argues critic Victor Pickard in his study of the political economy of US journalism. He discusses the long roots of commercialized media in this country, which for over a century and a half has put profits over public service.

Resources:

Victor Pickard, Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society Oxford University Press, 2019

Media, Inequality, and Change Center

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In his book Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, Jay Parini describes and analyzes three iconic works of fiction. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Parini writes, almost single-handedly created a mass audience for the antislavery movement. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn interrogated race in fundamental ways and introduced a distinctive vision of freedom. And On the Road inspired the Beat Generation and many subsequent countercultural tendencies and movements.

Jay Parini, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America Anchor, 2010 (paper)

Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter Doubleday, forthcoming

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Clarence Thomas is Donald Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice, which might confirm the liberal view that Thomas is simply a toady of the right.  But scholar Corey Robin argues that Thomas is a complex thinker and skilled rhetorician, whose ideas originate in black nationalism.  Robin reflects on how Thomas’ pessimism about the intractability of racism speaks uneasily to our times.

Resources:

Corey Robin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas  Metropolitan Books, 2019

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Highlights of some of the best commentary presented on Against the Grain in 2019, featuring Max Haiven on revenge in a capitalist context; Helena Sheehan on European and Soviet communism; Manu Samnotra on civilization and political resistance according to Gandhi; Michael Burawoy on Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx; and Margaret Hunter on what she calls “shape shifting into Blackness.”

Full interviews with Max Haiven, Helena Sheehan, Manu Samnotra, Michael Burawoy, and Margaret Hunter

The post A Look Back appeared first on KPFA.

When we on the left talk about the plight of the Palestinians, we usually talk about land – and rightly so. The dispossession of the Palestinians of their land has been a central element of the project of Israeli settler colonialism. But often what is forgotten is the question of Palestinian labor, its fundamental role in building the state of Israel and the complexities of the oppression of the Palestinians as workers. Andrew Ross, in his exploration of stone workers, brings Palestinian labor back into view. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Andrew Ross, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel Verso, 2019

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