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Being Poor in the Suburbs.

Photo by Andii, via Creative Commons.

x-posted from TAPPED.

Last month, Brookings released a report that showed poverty on the rise in suburbs, especially in the Midwest — now, suburbs have the largest share of the nation’s poor.

Suburbs often don’t have the same same level of services that many cities do, and the absence of things [...]

Love-Something-Who-Wedding.

I’m kind of tired of the bourgie-black-parents-have-to-deal-with-their-kid-dating-interracially thing.

A lot of the humor in Our Family Wedding (and Guess Who and Something New and hell, even that terrible MTV movie Love Song) seems to rest on the fact that the blacks! are! middle! class! With their cotillions and tennis and fancy cars!

Look, Guess Who’s Coming to [...]

Spreading Internet Access.

Cross-posted from TAPPED.

Bloggers and columnists, in the flurry of predictions that come at the start of any new year, are wondering how we’ll consume media in 2010. What will be the new Twitter? Will any of it will be enough to save old media outlets? These questions are important, but it’s worth remembering [...]

Stumping for Marriage: Bundles of Joy?

In a recently published study, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers  assessed the subjective happiness of women and found that despite greater opportunities, higher wages and increased education, their perceived feelings of well-being have decreased steadily over the last 35 years. In addition they identified a widening gap in the levels of subjective [...]

Book of the Month Discussion: The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. [Sticky Post]

The story of Michael Oher’s intellectual development is also the story of his body type. Michael Oher is rare. Huge. A freak of nature. He’s also an anomaly of nurture and it has taken a village to raise him. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis chronicles Oher’s turbulent childhood, his unlikely ascent into professional [...]

Digging In The Crates: Race and I.Q.

The following post was originally published in December 2007. We’re re-running it as it touches on a major component of our next Book of the Month pick, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side.

Michael Oher was born in the 1980s on the desperately poor, black side of Memphis. His father was murdered shortly after he was [...]

Book of the Month: The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.

This month we’ll be reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.

In an excerpt called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from Memphis who through a strange confluence of events ends up in the legal custody of a wealthy white family. At the time of his adoption [...]

Your Monday Random-Ass Roundup: Nuts about ACORN

Today in my office, a pimp and his prostitute came looking for advice on where to score some blow and advice on how to fill out their W-2s. When I told them what they could do, they accused me of encouraging them to engage in public masturbation. I hope Beck and Co. don’t get hold [...]

Your Monday* Random-Ass Roundup: Heard 'Em Say

Believe it or not, I’ve been known to be a jackass. Ask anyone who had the misfortune of knowing me in college. Or a couple years ago. I really hope President Obama isn’t asked about it anytime soon:

Anyway, lots of things have happened since our last Monday roundup. Here’s a few of them, a week [...]

Some Disjointed Thoughts on Blackface, 'Coonery,' and Hip Hop Fogeyism.

I’m probably gonna get pilloried for this by some folks, but I don’t care much for Spike Lee. Yeah, he’s talented and a pioneer and Do The Right Thing rightly deserves the praise it’s accorded. But the quality of his work varies too wildly, there’s a weird misogynistic streak in many of his films, [...]

Arguing by Way of Assertion.

A few months ago, I was taken aback by a wildly problematic post that was part of Danielle Belton’s “Unconventional Wisdom” series on her popular blog, the Black Snob. The problems in that entry, on integration’s destruction of “black community” and HBCUs in particular,  were glaring and easy to knock down. It augured very [...]

Your Monday Random-Ass Roundup: Acting Stupidly

Because of technical difficulties and an unusually busy work day, this almost became Your Tuesday Random-Ass Roundup. Sorry I’m late again.

DougJ at Balloon Juice: “We’re a country where a uniform and a badge entitles you to arrest people for speaking loudly on their porches.”

Your PostBourgie-approved weekend reading material:

First things first, Stacia, one of our [...]

Book of the Month Discussion: Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough.

I’ve been chomping at the bit to get to our discussion of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, this month’s reading/discussion group pick. The book follows the efforts of Geoffrey Canada and his audacious Harlem Children’s Zone program, a formidable array of proactive social programs that Canada hopes will lift every child in Harlem into [...]

Question for the Room.

[via.]

Over at the the  City Room blog, a social worker muses about race and class after an incident on the train. A young woman, about 18 or so,  is hitting her 4-year-old repeatedly. Before long, her friend joins in. The writer stepped in and yelled at her to stop. As you might imagine, things [...]

Criticizing Ross Douthat.

There was plenty to criticize in Ross Douthat’s column last week about Sarah Palin’s resignation as Governor of Alaska. He argues that because she’s got no fancy degrees and is aggressively anti-elite she represents a democratic, as opposed to meritocratic, ideal. Plenty of people did. But Freddie at the League of Ordinary Gentleman perhaps unfairly [...]