All posts tagged: white Americans

How The Atlantic first made sense of jazz

How The Atlantic first made sense of jazz

Published by skeptic

In 1922, a musicologist imagined how future historians might judge the day’s jazz cynics. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: PhotoQuest / Getty February 8, 2024, 12:09 PM ET This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. The year 1922 was an auspicious moment for America’s greatest original art form: A young cornetist named Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago to join King Oliver’s band, and the dowdy old Atlantic undertook its first efforts to make sense of the new musical genre known as jazz. To explain the fresh sounds, the magazine turned to Carl Engel, a composer and musicologist who served for years as the Library of Congress’s music-division chief. His approach is almost parodically scholarly; I imagine him setting his monocle down on a music stand to deliver this definition of the blues: “What the uninitiated tried to define by that homely appellation was, perhaps, an indistinct association of the minor mode and dyspeptic intonation with poor …

What Does the Working Class Really Want?

What Does the Working Class Really Want?

Published by skeptic

Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five “permanent” majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance—until, four years later, Richard Nixon’s narrow win augured an “emerging Republican majority” (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called “the Carter coalition,” which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bush’s operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. …

Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

Published by skeptic

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip. What happened? One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was …

Israel’s Deep State Understood the Dangers of Extremism

Israel’s Deep State Understood the Dangers of Extremism

Published by skeptic

During the fall of 2022, my family and I lived in Tel Aviv, where my wife and I were visiting professors at Reichman University, in Herzliya. I taught a class called “Democracy and Dictatorship.” It was a fraught time. Almost all of my students were in the military or veterans. Several were deeply concerned that Benjamin Netanyahu would bring a new era of antagonistic nationalism to Israel, at a time when they felt the country needed cohesion instead. One said she would likely leave the country if he won. As the former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, I was asked to speak at the university’s annual World Summit on Counter-Terrorism conference, on a panel about the dangers of far-right terrorism in the United States. In my presentation, I recounted a chilling conversation I’d had in June 2017 with a civil servant from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. He told me that Trump-administration officials had basically instructed his office to stop talking about white nationalists when they referred to domestic terrorism in the United States. …

Black Success, White Backlash – The Atlantic

Black Success, White Backlash – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal. Explore the November 2023 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More For …

Education Is Now America’s Great Divide

Education Is Now America’s Great Divide

Published by skeptic

Inequality is one of the great constants. But what sets those at the top of society apart from those at the bottom has varied greatly. In some times and places, it was race; in others, “noble” birth. In some, physical strength; in others, manual dexterity. In America today, most of these factors still matter. The country is racially unequal. Some people inherit great wealth; others become celebrities through sporting prowess. But much of America’s transformation in recent decades—including many of the country’s problems—can be ascribed to the ascendancy of a different marker of distinction: education. Whether or not you have graduated from college is especially important. This single social marker now determines much more than it did in the past what sort of economic opportunities you are likely to have and even how likely you are to get married. Educational status doesn’t only influence how Americans live, though. As a new set of papers from the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton shows, educational status has now overtaken other metrics, including race, in predicting one …

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truth – The Atlantic

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truth – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner. Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment. That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a …

‘Working Class’ Does Not Equal ‘White’

‘Working Class’ Does Not Equal ‘White’

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That the words working class are synonymous in the minds of many Americans with white working class is the result of a political myth. As the award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley explains in her new book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Black people are more likely to be working-class than white people are. Kelley’s Black Folk opens our minds up to Black workers, narrating their complex lives over 200 years of American history. Kelley looks at the history of her own working-class ancestors, as well as the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who made up the world of Black labor. Their joys. Their skills. Their challenges. She also offers historical context for the racist ideas about Black workers that endure in our time, while highlighting the ways that Black labor organizing has always helped to fight back against bigotry. Myths about race and class continue to dominate our political discourse. For a start, it is a myth that Americans without college degrees are, by definition, “working class.” Accumulated …

Christopher Rufo’s Theory of Change

Christopher Rufo’s Theory of Change

Published by skeptic

Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it. In the past several years, controversies over race, gender, and campus leftism have ripened in part due to his publicity. Often the so-called antiracists, trans activists, and tenured radicals at the center of the controversies are self-discrediting. All Rufo has to do is quote them or post their videos on his Twitter feed—a teacher fanatically devoted to a trendy form of social justice, say, or someone preening about their identity. Even those who find their behavior outrageous often find Rufo’s tactics distasteful as well. (Many of his targets strike me as mentally unbalanced.) But the thing about shit-stirrers is that even if they are distasteful or loathsome, they’d be out of work if there were not already raw material to stir. Rufo’s new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is in this context surprisingly hygienic. It is not about …