Walter Benn Michaels

Aug 13, 2024 | jacobin.com | Walter Benn Michaels

In 1987, worried that “too many children and people” had begun looking to society and hence to the government to solve their problems — e.g., “I am homeless, the Government must house me” — Margaret Thatcher famously denied there was such a thing as society. “Who is society?” she asked. “There is no such thing.”At that moment, seventeen-year-old Richard Billingham’s father had lost his job, his family had lost their home, and they were in fact being housed by the government.

Dec 29, 2023 | compactmag.com | Fredrik deBoer |Yascha Mounk |Adolph Reed Jr. |Walter Benn Michaels

The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity PoliticsBy Richard HananiaBroadside, 288 pages, $32 The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our TimeBy Yascha MounkPenguin, 416 pages, $32 No Politics But Class PoliticsBy Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn MichaelsEris, 390 pages, $25 Ten years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates, then a rising writer at The Atlantic, attended a gathering of liberal journalists at the White House.

Jul 19, 2023 | monde-diplomatique.fr | Walter Benn Michaels

En août 1955, Emmett Till, un Noir américain de 14 ans originaire de Chicago, est battu à mort dans l’État du Mississippi, où il rendait visite à des membres de sa famille. Ses deux meurtriers blancs sont arrêtés et jugés; il faut une heure au jury pour rendre son verdict — «non coupables». Ce meurtre n’avait rien d’inhabituel : l’abolition de la ségrégation raciale dans les écoles par la Cour suprême en 1954 avait déclenché une contestation souvent violente.