The Brewster-Douglas Housing Projects were built by the city of Detroit between 1935 and 1955 and were intended for the “working poor.” In the 1960s and 1970s, crime in the projects became prevalent and they fell into disrepair. (via Juan N Only, CC 2.0) There’s very little new in American politics, and that’s especially true Read More
Quite a start to the week: Ladies Love Cool James, Rozay and Fat Joe. Sincere didn’t go to #thecountryofAfrica for us to suffer through Mondays like that one.
In the Detroit of my youth, we were raised with values — values the lawyers and judges and City Council members who visited my schools would have approved — but they were too caught up in their own snobbish assumptions about people like us to imagine it.
Poverty isn’t just economic. It’s existential.
My blogmate Monica has been banging this drum for a minute, but John Sides looks at some new research that contradicts a bunch of the ideas about the voting habits of working class whites. Sides finds that the white working class is hardly a monolith, and says that studies show that they’re less motivated by Read More
Postbourgie’s own Shani Hilton has a much-discussed cover story in the Washington City Paper about being a black gentrifier. Freddie at L’Hote has some criticism: This is a several-thousand word article on the relationship between race and socioeconomic class, and about the tensions between old and new residents and poor and rich residents of a city Read More
Japan one week later. Minnesota’s lawmakers want to make it illegal for poor people to receive more than $20 cash from public assistance each month. (The initial bill would have made it illegal for poor folks to receive any cash.) How do you change a school’s culture? This is your War on Drugs: An 86-year-old Read More
In a dozen states, felons leave prison saddled with thousands of dollars in debt from child-support payments that continued to accrue while they were behind bars, and that they’ll likely never be able to pay.
In his piece for the Root, McWhorter argues that food access is not really a problem, and that it is not related with obesity levels. He gets many things very, very wrong.
It took a lame duck session and some nasty compromises to do it, but the House finally passed S. 3307, the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill, which is aimed at feeding more children in school (and making that food more nutritious). The Senate version differs significantly from the (better) House version of the bill (comparison Read More
