I’ve been a great defender of the academy as “a living archive” of ideas, some of which were supposed to have gone away due to unpopularity…Ideas kept alive and lively by impassioned scholars who can impart detail and vividness to the next generation. But I’ve also always suspected, and now want to insist, that it is also a form of social control. Suck in “the best and brightest”, absorb whatever privilege has caused them to […read the rest]
People of color & work in the US compiled by Professor Amory Starr Historical Resources Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth I’m going to give you a little tour of ‘people of color’ and work in the US. After the civil war, the freed slaves wanted land. You may have […read the rest]
why are people of color poor? behavioral vs. structural explanations compiled by Professor Amory Starr what we are trying to explain: more white people are poor than people of color, but a higher (“disproportionate”) percentage of people of color are poor than of whites sources: Holly Sklar, Chaos or Community 1995 Stephanie Coontz, The Way we Never Were 1992, Maxine Baca Zinn 1989 culture of poverty claims research responds people are poor because of their […read the rest]
Snake oil or Salvation?: Reconstructing Sociology Amory Starr & Tony Samara, c. 1997 Abstract: In this paper we attempt to respond to community activists’ critiques of academia, and of sociology in particular, focusing primarily on our political inactivity and the seeming contradiction between this inactivity and our rhetoric about our profession. Our concern is with the reasons for our inactivity, and we explore three possible approaches to explaining it. The first section focuses on our […read the rest]
