DR. BEN CARSON has the most moving personal narrative in modern presidential politics.
His mother, one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education. She was married at age 13, bore Ben and his brother, and then raised the boys as an impoverished single mother in Detroit.
.. But maybe the more interesting question is what Carson says about America. He seems to see his rise as an indication that America needs not so much social programs as firmer character.
.. One reason he is popular on the right, I think, is that many conservatives feel bruised by liberals’ jibes that they are closet racists or have no compassion for the poor. Supporting Carson validates their self-perception as good people who are doing the right thing by slashing social programs.
.. More broadly, Carson’s rise from inner-city poverty is inspiring but not easily replicable. Muggsy Bogues became an N.B.A. star even though he was 5 feet 3 inches tall, but short people are still at a disadvantage in basketball.
.. Devah Pager, a sociologist, sent out young black and white men to pose as job applicants and found that the whites were twice as likely to get callbacks as identically qualified black men. A white man with a felony conviction had as good a chance of getting a callback as a black applicant with a clean record.
Whom Does Philosophy Speak For?
I did not know, for example, that the Confederate flag was revived in Southern states during and after the civil rights movement in clear defiance of racial equality and integration. This was not just a flag that Confederate soldiers fought and died under. It became, as some South Carolinian representatives told us, a symbol of defiance and hatred, and a reminder that the Civil War may have been won but that the battle for overcoming racial prejudice has not ended.
.. These new technologies of the public sphere also challenge democratic societies in that the speed of the circulation of images often overwhelms the communicative and deliberative processes that need to take place among all those affected to unpack and understand what is being implied by these images
.. John Locke was also tutor and secretary to the earl of Shaftesbury, and he wrote the Constitution of the Carolinas for him. Locke is a colonizer, who believes that the white man’s labor in appropriating and working the land will create a condition that will be beneficial to all.
.. In view of the presence of these “others,” who haunt the text, what do we make of Locke’s theory of consent, equality and rationality? How much of these ideals are “polluted” by the presence of the other whose equal rationality is never presumed? This is the kind of question that the critical investigation of race in these texts leads us to ask.
.. I would argue that from Aristotle to Hume to Smith and even the early Hegel, we find another model of rationality as “embodied intelligence,” as the shaping of emotion by reason rather than its domination. John Dewey is the most articulate philosopher of this alternative understanding of rationality.
.. G.Y.: As a political theorist, do you think democracy is really able to deliver equality to black people, to fully translate universalistic human rights into real change for them, especially as they have, for hundreds of years, been deemed sub-persons?
S.B.: I don’t think that it is democracy that is failing black people in the United States, but the assault on democracy itself through the forces of a global corporate capitalism run amok and the rise of a vindictive and racist conservative movement that is unraveling the civic compact. Democracy is impossible without some form of socio-economic equality among citizens. Instead, in the United States in the last two decades, the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has increased, voting rights and union rights have been embattled. There is rampant criminal neglect of public goods such as highways, railroads and bridges – not to mention the brazen onslaught of big money to buy off elections since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision. We have become a mass democracy that is producing gridlock in representative institutions precisely because it is in the interest of global corporate capitalism to render representative institutions ineffective.
Obama: Police Are ‘Scapegoats’ for Broader Failures of Society
Too often, law enforcement gets scapegoated for broader failures of our society and our criminal-justice system,” he said. “You do your job with distinction no matter the challenges you face. But we can’t expect you to contain and control problems that the rest of us aren’t willing to face or do anything about‚ problems ranging from substandard education to a shortage of jobs and opportunity, an absence of drug-treatment programs, and laws that result in it being easier in too many neighborhoods for a young person to purchase a gun than a book.”
A Sensible Version of Donald Trump
They looked at the results of a Clinton-era program called Moving to Opportunity, which took poor families and moved them to middle-class neighborhoods. At first the results were disappointing. The families who moved didn’t see their earnings rise. Their kids didn’t do much better in school.
But as years went by and newer data accumulated, different and more promising results came in. Children who were raised in better environments had remarkable earnings gains. The girls raised in the better neighborhoods were more likely to marry and raise their own children in two-parent homes.
The first implication of this research is that neighborhood matters a lot.
.. Then we’ve got to get integrationist, to integrate different races and classes through national service and school and relocation vouchers. And finally, we have to get a little moralistic. There are certain patterns of behavior, like marrying before you have kids and sticking around to parent the kids you conceive, that contribute to better communities.