Every time members of a minority group identify something offensive—in media, in pop culture, in some other context—they’re pretty much immediately told not to be offended by people who don’t belong to that given group. The format changes from situation to situation but it usually goes like this: someone expresses offense, articulating why something is …
Category Archives: social justice
For Every Prejudiced Joke, A Validated Viewer
When people protest the use of prejudicial humour, they’re often told to lighten up. This is, after all, just a joke. Everyone knows it’s meant to be funny. In some cases, they’re told that the whole point of the joke is to make fun of people who think that way; no one really thinks Jewish …
Locked Out of the Academy: When You Can’t Read Research Based On You
I read a lot of social science journals. I’m probably not alone in that. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, including complex and detailed studies of individuals, populations, and phenomena. Sociology journals, for example, help me understand my own society as well as that of others, and they shed light on specific things …
Anti-Asian-American Racism
That this country has a significant problem with anti-Asian racism is a well-established fact, and the fact that many people don’t fully understand the scope of this problem is rather significant. Even more so is the fact that there’s a very special subset of anti-Asian racism that really needs to be dealt with as its …
‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’
Five little words often spoken in response to finding out that someone is in an abusive relationship; the variant, of course, being ‘why didn’t she just leave’ in response to a horrific outcome in a violent relationship. She’s a grown woman, after all, she could have just walked out the door and not looked back. …
Why Is the US Still Using Solitary Confinement?
Something rather astounding happened in 2011: prisoners went on strike, and people paid attention. A hunger strike over conditions in California prisons that started at Pelican Bay, the state’s notorious supermax facility infamous for its use of solitary confinement, spread across the state, attracting headlines and attention across the country. Not just in prison media, …
Failing Our Elders
Much as we live in a society where the very young are discounted and devalued, dehumanised by the very laws that supposedly protect them, we also live in a world in which our elders are equally disrespected and marginalised. Despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, that numbers of elders are growing, their position …
Incarcerating Youth Shouldn’t Be A For-Profit Business
Incarcerating anyone shouldn’t be a for-profit business, strictly speaking, but the rising market in youth incarceration is particularly disturbing. As the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out in investigations conducted last year, there are some special concerns with incarcerated youth, and it’s disturbing to see the number of youth in prison on the rise. Particularly …
Where Are the Protections for US Domestic Workers?
Nannies. Housekeepers. Cooks. Care providers. The faces who slip quietly through the houses of the wealthy and some members of the middle class, making their lives run more smoothly, distancing them from the dirty realities of cleaning toilets, peeling potatoes, holding back the hair of a sick child, turning a paralysed family member to prevent …
Cult of the Foetus
The so-called ‘pro-life’ movement puzzles me deeply, and not just in the sense that I am troubled by the attitudes which place the value of a foetus—viable or not—over that of the person who carries it. No, I mean in the sense of the deep hypocrisy which runs through the movement; even if you think …
