Opinion | The Slave Trade Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere – The New York Times

The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his subhuman characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best, Williams writes. The planter, he continues, would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.

One thing Id like you to consider, and this is something I will return to in the future, is the extent to which racial distinctions and racial divisions are rooted in relationships of class, labor and property, even when they take on a life and logic of their own. And if thats true, I would like you to think about what that means for unraveling those divisions and distinctions, and consigning the ideology of race to the ash heap of history.

My Tuesday column was on a supposedly pro-worker proposal from Senator Marco Rubio that does little more than give employers another avenue for union busting.

If an employee involvement organization cannot bargain and cannot negotiate and can be dissolved at any point by the employer, then what purpose does it serve other than to subvert union organizers and channel worker unrest into a front organization for management? The same goes for the nonvoting board representative. Without power to act, what does it matter that someone is permitted to watch and listen?

My Friday column was, yet again, on how the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans.

It is Congress, and not the Supreme Court, that has, over time, done more to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans. To do the same, the court has had to reverse its own work. As Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor of law at Harvard, has written, As a matter of historical practice, the Court has wielded an antidemocratic influence on American law, one that has undermined federal attempts to eliminate hierarchies of race, wealth, and status.

Brian Highsmith and Kathleen Thelen on the role of the courts in American political economy for the Law and Political Economy Project.

Michael Hobbes on cancel culture in a video essay for YouTube.

Musab Younis on whiteness for The London Review of Books.

Teresa M. Bejan on equality and egalitarianism for the Boston Review.

Natasha Lennard on liberal immigration policies in BookForum.

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Opinion | The Slave Trade Didn't Come Out of Nowhere - The New York Times