Cultureplaces

Book Party  Review A new book argues that accusing people of unearned advantages does nothing to address inequality -- and may only make things worse. By  Carlos Lozada   March 23 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/03/23/the-last-thing-on-privilege-youll-ever-need-to-read/?utm_term=.3f6450c0f480 (Washington Post illustration) THE PERILS OF ‘PRIVILEGE': Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by  Accusing Others of Advantage by Phoebe Maltz Bovy St. Martin’s Press. 324 pp. $26.99 Someone needs to book Phoebe Maltz Bovy on one of those television shows featuring people who have the most awful jobs in America, because she has just completed a project so soul-crushing that I can’t imagine anyone ever doing it again, certainly not voluntarily. She has scoured the Internet for every overwrought think piece and self-indulgent personal essay about privilege — and has read all ...

Review of "We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation" by Jeff Chang By  Carlos Lozada   September 29, 2016   (iStock) WE GON’ BE ALRIGHT: Notes on Race and Resegregation By Jeff Chang Picador. 192 pp. $16. Grade Point newsletter News and issues affecting higher education. Sign up The copious books confronting this moment in America’s racial politics — a mix of reporting and meditations on President Obama, on Black Lives Matter, on police violence and mass incarceration — can be roughly divided into two broad categories. There are the My Story works, deeply personal accounts in which the authors draw on their own lives to illuminate their arguments, often in self-conscious reference or emulation of notable activist voices of the past; and the Our Story versions, works of history and big-picture analysis, more academic in inspiration but no less ambitious in their ends. Jeff Chang’s book on the culture wars and resegregat...