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Zara Stone, Killer Looks: The Forgotten History of Plastic Surgery in Prisons: I did not know about the practice, through most of the 20th century, of offering plastic surgery to over half a million (mostly male) inmates in order to rehabilitate them/make it easier for them to reintegrate after release. That’s about what I can say for this book, which is roughly chronological, occasionally anachronistic (there were no “red states” and “blue states” in the 1950s), and somewhat digressive though understandably so in its discussion of the evidence of how physical attractiveness—both racialized and within racial categories—affects how a person is treated. Stone attributes the elimination of most programs to a combination of punitiveness/anti-“free stuff” for prisoners attitudes; unwarranted denigration of rehabilitation as a concept; and concerns about experimentation on prisoners, since many surgeons practiced on inmates. I did learn that prisoners have almost five times as many head injuries as nonprisoners, and that facial trauma accounts for 1/3 of inmate ER visits, compared to 0.7% for the general population.
Emmanuel Probst, Brand Hacks: How to Build Brands by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning (rev. ed.): Bog-standard business book with random anecdotes and a real survivor bias, focusing on tactics that were successful for particular businesses without discussing whether they are often successful (though in fairness the book occasionally mentions that the specific tactics discussed won’t work for everyone, e.g. you have to be authentic, but “authenticity is not for everyone,” which is not very helpful). Does suggest that the power of social media is overblown since marketers are of the class most likely to be on social media. Advice includes having your brand “help make people feel less lonely” by giving it a face and enabling customers to “take Instagram-worthy pictures in your store.” Or you could “[b]uy an old brand and revive its heritage,” though “nostalgia is not for every brand. In some cases, nostalgia can marginalize your brand by emphasizing that it is out of touch and is no longer relevant to consumers.” Long-form content is apparently 90 seconds long (“ ‘Really good content entices people to watch through the end,’ says Abraham, quoting the example of a 90-second video that performed better than a 30-second video.”). Denigrates giving product specifics as “pointless,” because marketing is all about emotion—Always pads shouldn’t compete on absorption but rather build its brand around “confidence.” This may indeed be a useful tool, but it’s depressing. Best quote, most representative of how helpful this book would actually be: “Marketing columnist and former marketing professor Mark Ritson sums it all up: ‘Do customers want purpose-filled brands? Sometimes. In some categories. Depending on how it is done. A lot of time they don’t give a fuck. And usually most segments will not pay more.’”
Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War: A stubborn cis white gay man, fired from his defense job because he was gay, waged a decades-long war against anti-homosexual discrimination starting in the 1950s and was a major figure in the homophile movement/Mattachine Society. Early on he developed the position that being homosexual was a positive good, which he insisted on while suffering the jeers of those who pointed to the Bible, the positive law, the official position of psychiatry, and the consensus of polite society. He filed legal briefs (pro se) making this argument along with, or sometimes instead of, legal ones. He persisted long past the point of diminishing returns, couldn’t pay his bills, annoyed people around him including his allies, insisted on a politics of respectability that eventually became very outdated, and lived long enough to see himself vindicated and his security clearance retroactively reinstated.
Ken Ellingwood, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery: Lovejoy, a white evangelical who insisted on his right to publish against slavery even in pro-slavery towns, was unbending and was eventually the first publisher killed by a pro-slavery mob, though not the last. An important reminder—his white murderers were, as far as the facts indicate, not themselves enslavers (he was killed in a theoretically free state), but felt their interests challenged by his opposition to it, since their town was economically sustained by trade with enslavers and they shared white fear of “servile insurrection” spurred by abolition talk.
Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: The "univer-city" as neoliberal colonizer, supporting gentrification and policing of the urban, mostly Black/Latinx communities it purports to uplift. Almost nothing a university does to interact with a community receives favor; the thing that made me most skeptical was Baldwin’s agreement with critics that NYU shouldn’t build bigger apartment towers on land that it already owned and already used for apartment housing, because … it was already too big and construction would take some time, as far as I could tell. I mean, dunk on John Sexton all you want, it’s fun and usually correct, but I didn’t really see the problem with increasing density and not displacing other institutions or people. Baldwin’s model of doing ok—the best that can be done under capitalism—is a regional Canadian university that gets most of its students from the area and, among other things, declined to hire Aramark to provide food, instead contracting with local providers, which sounds like I’m making fun but in fact I think is one of the simplest things a university could do to make a noticeable positive community impact.
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States: Thorough and depressing book linking the continued expropriation of Native and Black people’s wealth and lives to the prosperity of white America through the story of St. Louis. “The red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” Johnson argues, among other things, that whites used Indian removal as a model for how they treated Blacks—white flight was important, but so was kicking Black people out of whatever land they were on when whites decided they had better uses for it. St. Louis began American life as an outpost of empire and beneficiary of the defense industry when that mostly meant defense against Indians, and in 1836 became the site of “arguably the first lynching in the history of the United States,” of a Black steward who thought he could move as freely as any white man in the imperial trade system of which St. Louis was a part.
In St. Louis after the Civil War, federal troops whose commander already used to killing Indians in California fired on Black and white striking workers, who were engaging in a general strike whose unprecedented interracial solidarity made its threat potential incredibly clear to the powerful men of the day. After the strike was crushed, city leaders began the Veiled Prophet parade, which continues to the present day; the image of the Veiled Prophet in the book bears a striking resemblance to a KKK cloak and hood. Meanwhile, St. Louis was the launching point for US troops who redeployed from the South at the end of Reconstruction to drive Indians onto reservations or into death.
The 1917 East St. Louis Massacre prefigured Tulsa, but was deadlier. Predatory national corporations founded their own municipalities on the margins, where they could pollute, evade taxes, and buy politicians on the cheap. Because valuable industrial property was hardly taxed, the government relied on fees and fines that fell most heavily on the poor, which would still be a feature of injustice a century later. But at least the white workers got the satisfaction of knowing that East St. Louis and similar environs were hostile to Blacks. As Blacks migrated North for opportunities, white politicians and newspapers stoked fears of black “colonization” and connected that to claims of voter fraud, representing what Johnson calls “the impulse toward ethnic cleansing that lies latent at the heart of our democracy.” Fear of replacement by Black workers stoked white racism; this fear of replacement no longer centers on work, but remains potent.
In the 20th century, racial restrictions slowly moved from explicit to implicit, but were powerful forms of wealth expropriation and suppression either way. Landlords could charge higher rents and do less maintenance when Black tenants lacked alternatives; the deterioration of their buildings would then be blamed on Black residence and used to justify moving them off the land and redeveloping it. A brief resurgence of working-class Black activism in the 1930s was again ruthlessly suppressed by wealthy whites; the Communists who came in to organize didn’t make common cause with non-Communist Blacks who otherwise might have supported collective action, and then the postwar settlement between capital and labor privileged unions from which Black workers had long been excluded. Discussing “anaphylactic” white violence in response to the brief integration of a public swimming pool, Johnson writes that “racism and capitalism were not identical …. They were always in excess of one another—capitalism mobilizing and exploiting whites as well as Blacks, and white supremacy providng pleasure, even the filthy pleasures of racial disgust and collective violence, as well as profit.” (When the pool was reopened, whites boycotted, so the parks department closed the pool and filled it with concrete.)
I’ve read more about the later parts of this story—urban renewal aka “Negro removal,” construction of highways that destroyed Black neighborhoods in order to allow white suburbanites to have easier commutes into the city whose taxes they would not pay, public housing that was immediately underfunded and left to deteriorate (the elevators of Pruitt-Igoe stopped on every other floor to save money), and so on. Here’s a shocking fact: “By the late 1960s, there were more sociologists working in Pruitt-Igoe than dedicated maintenance workers.” And another: You probably know that police militarization has a lot of links with the actual US military, but did you know that the Army conducted secret radiological weapons experiments in 1953-4 in St. Louis, a total of 163 chemical releases in neighborhoods that researchers had identified as “densely populated slum districts” and “poorer sections” that were useful because they were subject to greater “police surveillance”? (The NIH says the doses weren’t high enough to be dangerous.)
Still later, city officials used redevelopment initiatives and block grants to drive Blacks out and increase the value of the downtown district. Restrictions on property taxes for high-value property, which benefit wealthy owners, contribute to St. Louis’s self-defeating use of the one survival tactic that appears to remain: giving tax subsidies to businesses. So St. Louis ended up paying $70 million directly to the owner of the Rams because of a stadium deal, only for the billionaire owner to move the team back to LA, leaving St. Louis “the owner of a 67,000-seat stadium in which to host horse shows and church conventions, as well as $144 million of debt still to be paid on the bonds that it had issued to pay for the stadium in the first place.” Meanwhile, poor Black homeowners were losing their houses for unpaid property taxes, and then the city is too broke to keep the seized houses up to code.
Even when the state receives payroll tax revenue for its sweetheart deals, it’s notable that the money goes to the legislature and not to the local schools (as property taxes would). Given gerrymandering, this represents a transfer to white rural Republicans from predominantly Black schools. And disadvantage piles on disadvantage: the cash-starved Normandy school district lost its accreditation; state law thus allows students to transfer to nearby districts, but only for $20,000 per student—more than Normandy has per student. So, for five years at the time of writing, this struggling district has been subsidizing the schools in wealthy counties—including Ladue, one of the wealthiest counties in the US. And that’s before we get to the expropriation of Black wealth in the mortgage crisis and the imprisonment of Black Missourians in predominantly white rural areas.
This book should be read by anyone who wants to see how different aspects of structural racism interlock.
Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil: Starts with a powerful idea borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov: “Germans should talk about the singularity of the Holocaust, Jews should talk about its universality.” The former is taking responsibility, but a German who discusses genocide as a universal phenomenon is “seeking exoneration; if everyone commits mass murder one way or another, how could they help doing it too?” Neiman argues that, as a Jewish author, she need not argue for exact equivalence between the Holocaust and the crimes of other nations: “it’s a matter of taking responsibility for the latter,” and she is an American Jew. She investigates how Germans have confronted their pasts and compares that to the American experience. The Germans of course have several long compound words, one of which roughly translates to working-off-the-past. “The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt; both, it seems, can be worked off with sufficient effort.” She argues that East Germany did a better job confronting and overcoming the Nazi past than West Germany, because anti-Communism was an acceptable thing for an ex-Nazi to emphasize in the West. If Germans (who might be fathers and grandfathers of the Germans confronting these questions) were after Bolsheviks, then Jews were just in the way; if fascism and communism were equal, then their fathers/grandfathers were fighting evil too. Though Westerners thought of antifascism as imposed on the East from above, by Communist rulers, Neiman suggests that’s too simple. An amazing paragraph:
(In 1953, sufficiently documented Auschwitz survivors could receive $450 for each year spent there, less than the pensions paid to former SS guards and their widows.) That isn’t to say that East Germany didn’t use antifascism “as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression”; she agrees that it did. But even if it was in part a foreign policy tool, antifascism was itself a good thing, just like civil rights legislation in the US that was in part anticommunist propaganda to rebut Soviet critiques of US segregation.
Neiman suggests that the recent rise of right-wing sentiment in the East comes from resentment at longstanding Western scorn for East Germans. This contempt became economic policy: since pensions were calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, and since East Germans had most basics like rent and food subsidized and correspondingly low salaries, they now get less in retirement, and can be furious at refugees getting state support.
Neiman also compares US memory and forgetting, including how James Meredith objects to the monument to him at the University of Mississippi that includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.” But I learned less simply because I already know much more about our history of reckoning with atrocity, or mostly of failing to do so. (I read this months ago, before the news cycle became full of too many whites’ demand that we forget most of our racist history.)
Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future: Kolbert explores aspects of what the natural world will look like as we enter fully into the anthropocene. You know about carbon, but did you know that human fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than the rest of the terrestrial ecosystem, or that we routinely cause earthquakes? People outweigh wild animals by eight to one, and it’s 22 to one if you add in domestic animals. The consequences of our changes are well underway. Louisiana has shrunk by over 2000 square miles since the 1930s, more than Delaware or Rhode Island. Debates over gene editing now must include that the alternative for animals is likely extinction, as well as that our previous attempts at moving genomes around the world in animals or plants have often been disastrous. She talks to a researcher who thinks we need to think about carbon dioxide like sewage: we understand that it wouldn’t help to punish people if they went to the bathroom too often, but we also don’t let them shit on the sidewalk. So she also talks to people who propose geoengineering mitigation solutions, though she characterizes at least some as being like “treating a heroin habit with amphetamines.” But most of her interviewees say some version of: geoengineering is like chemotherapy; you don’t use it because you have better options. One says: “We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.” But only might be.
Jennifer Taub, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime: There’s a lot of corruption, wage theft, and fraud in the US, and we don’t even track it (so when you hear crime has spiked, think about the things we don’t try to count). I don’t think I’d seen this about the GM ignitition switch scandal, where they killed a bunch of people to save money on a part costing less than a dollar and then covered it up: One driver pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she lost control of her car and her boyfriend was killed. For years, the woman believed she was responsible for his death and her own severe injuries, but five months before she pled guilty, GM’s internal review found that the ignition switch was at fault in her accident. GM didn’t tell her; instead, it wrote a letter to NHTSA falsely saying it hadn’t looked at the crash. Seven years after the accident, she was finally cleared. And the lack of prosecution has gotten worse even in the past ten years—even as late as 2006, the DOJ was convicting CEOs, presidents, CFOs, and COOs more regularly. But court decisions and prosecutor timidity have made that far less common. We also help launder money from thieves and corrupt politicians around the world. Our elected officials and administrators could choose differently, if we had the votes and the will.
Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet: Argues that the internet is built on a fundamentally flawed model of ad-supported content with too many intermediaries to allow any certainty that real people, much less the right people, are seeing ads supposedly targeted to them, even before the ever-increasing presence of ad-blockers is taken into account. Rather than publishers being ad-supported, mostly it’s intermediaries sucking out as much as 70 percent of the revenues from an ad. I think the book is basically right except that a bubble can last a lot longer than it should when there don’t seem to be other, better alternatives, which I think is the case here—advertisers have budgets and want to use them. But the critique of targeted advertising—it’s way more expensive than nontargeted ads and often quite inaccurate and permeated with fraud—is persuasive for anyone looking for how they should allocate their ad budgets.
Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America: Uses stories of Baltimore’s free Blacks to explore the complicated ways in which they used citizenship claims and rights claims to reinforce each other, before and even sometimes after Chief Justice Taney declared in the Dred Scott case that Blacks could not be citizens. For example, they pointed out that white women were citizens even though white women couldn’t vote or hold property (in many places) by themselves. Black people filed petitions; they litigated; they made claims in the papers and in the streets. Those tactics didn’t always succeed, and there wasn’t always agreement about the best course of action (including leaving Maryland for the North, or Canada, or even Liberia), but they did claim the status of rights-bearing people.
Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit: Fascinating book. Mears spent several years with party promoters—almost all men, often Black men—who made money by bringing models or attractive “civilians” to high-end clubs so that the clubs would be attractive to big-spending men (usually white US, European, Arab, or Asian men). Acceptable “girls” have to look under thirty, be five foot seven or over and wear heels, and thin—and they are mostly white though a real model is always welcome whatever her race; being “hot” isn’t enough because the clubs want a specific “model” look. The big spenders, the promoters say, want “the real thing” if they’re spending $15,000 a night. The girls are there to dance, mingle, or just be there and look beautiful. “[G]irls are valuable; women are not.”
Mears emphasizes all the work that is required to create these experiences of pleasure and lack of inhibition, where—most visibly—hundreds of bottles of champagne can be wasted in displays of excess that no one seems willing to fully endorse while they’re not experiencing it. Almost every client Mears interviewed criticized staged displays of waste, but defended their own large bills. Because of the biggest “whales,” “even the biggest spenders could see their purchases as relatively modest.” Some also attributed the worst excesses to ethnic others: Russians and Saudis. Or they attributed them to people who didn’t work to earn their money, the way they themselves did. One line: “Despite securing his enviable hedge fund job at his family’s firm after having just graduated from an unexceptional college, Ricardo insisted and seemed to genuinely believe that his income reflected his hard work.” It was common for male clients to say that they deserved occasional indulgences because they worked so hard, and also that it was an important way to network with potential business partners.
The distinctions get even more complicated, because the richest men are often comped drinks because of the expectation that they’ll bring even more business, like holding a party at the club or investing in the owner’s next venture. So most clubs make the bulk of their profits from $1500 to $3000 tables populated by “affluent tourists and businessmen” who “regularly run up high-volume tabs because they, too, want to be close to power and beauty,” but who aren’t comped. (They might avoid having to pay a high table minimum if they come in with three or four models, though.)
Conspicuous consumption doesn’t just happen; people around rich people have to work very hard “to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.” She focuses on “the backstage work of vulnerable women and marginalized men,” in which girls are “a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” Clubs let clients “act out domination over each other and over girls’ bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly …. In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.”
And of course the clients and business owners don’t think of the girls as people who might have interesting minds or careers; there is a constant risk of stigmatization as a sex worker, which also usefully functions to limit what girls might ask for. While men used girls to make friends and deals, girls “who demanded a share of profits, in the form of financial support or gifts, were deemed users, schemers, and whores.” This is what Mears means when she says that female beauty was worth more to the men who traded in it than to the women who theoretically had it. Relatedly, the labor required for the girls to be present in the clubs is invisible, assumed to be leisure. Club owners pay promoters thousands of dollars to bring a group of high-quality models in, but owners or promoters would never pay the women themselves to attend, because that wouldn’t be authentic (and many girls would have found that unpleasant, feeling too much like work). Most girls didn’t know how much promoters made, and generally estimated that promoters earned a lot less than they actually did.
Mears also emphasizes that these are complicated mixtures of pleasure, work, and exploitation for both the “girls” and the promoters, who act as friends and often errand runners, housing providers and/or sexual partners for the girls. (Girls rarely have sex with actual clients; the main point is to show off an excess of female beauty, just like the empty champagne bottles that were sprayed around show off the ability to waste alcohol.) The girls get to go exclusive places they couldn’t afford on their own, including foreign locales, but they have to go out and hang out in the clubs in return. The relational work the promoters did highlights that “exploitation works best when it feels good.” The promoters, who are rarely from higher class backgrounds, often think that they’ll be able to join the big spenders who will eventually back their own business ventures—and this has even happened to a few promoters turned club owners—but mostly they too are providing a service and are ultimately replaceable.
Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire: Updates Stone’s previous book from the last ten years or so, including a bit on the acceleration of Amazon’s dominance wrought by the pandemic. Some interesting tidbits, including about Bezos’s apparently genuine commitment to the independence of the Washington Post. He did have some ideas: he wondered whether the paper would need so many editors if it hired great writers. In order to get him off this tack, some editors took to sending them their highest-profile reporters’ unedited copy, and eventually he stopped pushing the idea, though Amazon denied that Bezos read the emails. Consistent with his hostility to unions, Bezos did ditch the perfectly stable pension fund for new employees, replacing it with 401(k)s. Stone also reports on Amazon’s struggles with video as it made deals with Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, while the video business was headed by a guy who also allegedly mistreated women.
Stone provides further confirmation that Amazon employees did peek at third-party sellers’ data to give their house brands competitive advantages, despite Amazon’s official denials that this occurred. Some of this seems like a good idea. “For example, customer reviews in the all-important category of dog poop bags indicated regular confusion about which end of the bag opened. So the Amazon Basics version included a blue arrow and the words ‘open this end.’” Amazon defends this kind of data analysis as being open to anyone who cared to do it, and many of the house brands don’t seem to be harming established brands, but several house brand managers admitted to exploiting something a lot harder to compete with: access to prominence in Amazon search results. When they introduced a new brand, Amazon brand managers could give it an initial “relevancy score” matched to that of an established product, making it appear at the top of search results instead of “starting on the unseen last page with other new brands.” Amazon officially denies this, but I have no doubt that Stone’s anonymous informants told the truth.
Amazon’s reputation for predation certainly doesn’t get better from this book overall. One telling story involves a high level employee departing for Target. “Here was one of the more naked hypocrisies at Amazon, which aggressively poached employees from competitors but considered it an act of absolute treachery when an executive left for a rival.” Only expensive lawyers eventually eased the executive’s slowed-down transition.
Emmanuel Probst, Brand Hacks: How to Build Brands by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning (rev. ed.): Bog-standard business book with random anecdotes and a real survivor bias, focusing on tactics that were successful for particular businesses without discussing whether they are often successful (though in fairness the book occasionally mentions that the specific tactics discussed won’t work for everyone, e.g. you have to be authentic, but “authenticity is not for everyone,” which is not very helpful). Does suggest that the power of social media is overblown since marketers are of the class most likely to be on social media. Advice includes having your brand “help make people feel less lonely” by giving it a face and enabling customers to “take Instagram-worthy pictures in your store.” Or you could “[b]uy an old brand and revive its heritage,” though “nostalgia is not for every brand. In some cases, nostalgia can marginalize your brand by emphasizing that it is out of touch and is no longer relevant to consumers.” Long-form content is apparently 90 seconds long (“ ‘Really good content entices people to watch through the end,’ says Abraham, quoting the example of a 90-second video that performed better than a 30-second video.”). Denigrates giving product specifics as “pointless,” because marketing is all about emotion—Always pads shouldn’t compete on absorption but rather build its brand around “confidence.” This may indeed be a useful tool, but it’s depressing. Best quote, most representative of how helpful this book would actually be: “Marketing columnist and former marketing professor Mark Ritson sums it all up: ‘Do customers want purpose-filled brands? Sometimes. In some categories. Depending on how it is done. A lot of time they don’t give a fuck. And usually most segments will not pay more.’”
Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War: A stubborn cis white gay man, fired from his defense job because he was gay, waged a decades-long war against anti-homosexual discrimination starting in the 1950s and was a major figure in the homophile movement/Mattachine Society. Early on he developed the position that being homosexual was a positive good, which he insisted on while suffering the jeers of those who pointed to the Bible, the positive law, the official position of psychiatry, and the consensus of polite society. He filed legal briefs (pro se) making this argument along with, or sometimes instead of, legal ones. He persisted long past the point of diminishing returns, couldn’t pay his bills, annoyed people around him including his allies, insisted on a politics of respectability that eventually became very outdated, and lived long enough to see himself vindicated and his security clearance retroactively reinstated.
Ken Ellingwood, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery: Lovejoy, a white evangelical who insisted on his right to publish against slavery even in pro-slavery towns, was unbending and was eventually the first publisher killed by a pro-slavery mob, though not the last. An important reminder—his white murderers were, as far as the facts indicate, not themselves enslavers (he was killed in a theoretically free state), but felt their interests challenged by his opposition to it, since their town was economically sustained by trade with enslavers and they shared white fear of “servile insurrection” spurred by abolition talk.
Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: The "univer-city" as neoliberal colonizer, supporting gentrification and policing of the urban, mostly Black/Latinx communities it purports to uplift. Almost nothing a university does to interact with a community receives favor; the thing that made me most skeptical was Baldwin’s agreement with critics that NYU shouldn’t build bigger apartment towers on land that it already owned and already used for apartment housing, because … it was already too big and construction would take some time, as far as I could tell. I mean, dunk on John Sexton all you want, it’s fun and usually correct, but I didn’t really see the problem with increasing density and not displacing other institutions or people. Baldwin’s model of doing ok—the best that can be done under capitalism—is a regional Canadian university that gets most of its students from the area and, among other things, declined to hire Aramark to provide food, instead contracting with local providers, which sounds like I’m making fun but in fact I think is one of the simplest things a university could do to make a noticeable positive community impact.
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States: Thorough and depressing book linking the continued expropriation of Native and Black people’s wealth and lives to the prosperity of white America through the story of St. Louis. “The red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” Johnson argues, among other things, that whites used Indian removal as a model for how they treated Blacks—white flight was important, but so was kicking Black people out of whatever land they were on when whites decided they had better uses for it. St. Louis began American life as an outpost of empire and beneficiary of the defense industry when that mostly meant defense against Indians, and in 1836 became the site of “arguably the first lynching in the history of the United States,” of a Black steward who thought he could move as freely as any white man in the imperial trade system of which St. Louis was a part.
In St. Louis after the Civil War, federal troops whose commander already used to killing Indians in California fired on Black and white striking workers, who were engaging in a general strike whose unprecedented interracial solidarity made its threat potential incredibly clear to the powerful men of the day. After the strike was crushed, city leaders began the Veiled Prophet parade, which continues to the present day; the image of the Veiled Prophet in the book bears a striking resemblance to a KKK cloak and hood. Meanwhile, St. Louis was the launching point for US troops who redeployed from the South at the end of Reconstruction to drive Indians onto reservations or into death.
The 1917 East St. Louis Massacre prefigured Tulsa, but was deadlier. Predatory national corporations founded their own municipalities on the margins, where they could pollute, evade taxes, and buy politicians on the cheap. Because valuable industrial property was hardly taxed, the government relied on fees and fines that fell most heavily on the poor, which would still be a feature of injustice a century later. But at least the white workers got the satisfaction of knowing that East St. Louis and similar environs were hostile to Blacks. As Blacks migrated North for opportunities, white politicians and newspapers stoked fears of black “colonization” and connected that to claims of voter fraud, representing what Johnson calls “the impulse toward ethnic cleansing that lies latent at the heart of our democracy.” Fear of replacement by Black workers stoked white racism; this fear of replacement no longer centers on work, but remains potent.
In the 20th century, racial restrictions slowly moved from explicit to implicit, but were powerful forms of wealth expropriation and suppression either way. Landlords could charge higher rents and do less maintenance when Black tenants lacked alternatives; the deterioration of their buildings would then be blamed on Black residence and used to justify moving them off the land and redeveloping it. A brief resurgence of working-class Black activism in the 1930s was again ruthlessly suppressed by wealthy whites; the Communists who came in to organize didn’t make common cause with non-Communist Blacks who otherwise might have supported collective action, and then the postwar settlement between capital and labor privileged unions from which Black workers had long been excluded. Discussing “anaphylactic” white violence in response to the brief integration of a public swimming pool, Johnson writes that “racism and capitalism were not identical …. They were always in excess of one another—capitalism mobilizing and exploiting whites as well as Blacks, and white supremacy providng pleasure, even the filthy pleasures of racial disgust and collective violence, as well as profit.” (When the pool was reopened, whites boycotted, so the parks department closed the pool and filled it with concrete.)
I’ve read more about the later parts of this story—urban renewal aka “Negro removal,” construction of highways that destroyed Black neighborhoods in order to allow white suburbanites to have easier commutes into the city whose taxes they would not pay, public housing that was immediately underfunded and left to deteriorate (the elevators of Pruitt-Igoe stopped on every other floor to save money), and so on. Here’s a shocking fact: “By the late 1960s, there were more sociologists working in Pruitt-Igoe than dedicated maintenance workers.” And another: You probably know that police militarization has a lot of links with the actual US military, but did you know that the Army conducted secret radiological weapons experiments in 1953-4 in St. Louis, a total of 163 chemical releases in neighborhoods that researchers had identified as “densely populated slum districts” and “poorer sections” that were useful because they were subject to greater “police surveillance”? (The NIH says the doses weren’t high enough to be dangerous.)
Still later, city officials used redevelopment initiatives and block grants to drive Blacks out and increase the value of the downtown district. Restrictions on property taxes for high-value property, which benefit wealthy owners, contribute to St. Louis’s self-defeating use of the one survival tactic that appears to remain: giving tax subsidies to businesses. So St. Louis ended up paying $70 million directly to the owner of the Rams because of a stadium deal, only for the billionaire owner to move the team back to LA, leaving St. Louis “the owner of a 67,000-seat stadium in which to host horse shows and church conventions, as well as $144 million of debt still to be paid on the bonds that it had issued to pay for the stadium in the first place.” Meanwhile, poor Black homeowners were losing their houses for unpaid property taxes, and then the city is too broke to keep the seized houses up to code.
Even when the state receives payroll tax revenue for its sweetheart deals, it’s notable that the money goes to the legislature and not to the local schools (as property taxes would). Given gerrymandering, this represents a transfer to white rural Republicans from predominantly Black schools. And disadvantage piles on disadvantage: the cash-starved Normandy school district lost its accreditation; state law thus allows students to transfer to nearby districts, but only for $20,000 per student—more than Normandy has per student. So, for five years at the time of writing, this struggling district has been subsidizing the schools in wealthy counties—including Ladue, one of the wealthiest counties in the US. And that’s before we get to the expropriation of Black wealth in the mortgage crisis and the imprisonment of Black Missourians in predominantly white rural areas.
This book should be read by anyone who wants to see how different aspects of structural racism interlock.
Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil: Starts with a powerful idea borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov: “Germans should talk about the singularity of the Holocaust, Jews should talk about its universality.” The former is taking responsibility, but a German who discusses genocide as a universal phenomenon is “seeking exoneration; if everyone commits mass murder one way or another, how could they help doing it too?” Neiman argues that, as a Jewish author, she need not argue for exact equivalence between the Holocaust and the crimes of other nations: “it’s a matter of taking responsibility for the latter,” and she is an American Jew. She investigates how Germans have confronted their pasts and compares that to the American experience. The Germans of course have several long compound words, one of which roughly translates to working-off-the-past. “The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt; both, it seems, can be worked off with sufficient effort.” She argues that East Germany did a better job confronting and overcoming the Nazi past than West Germany, because anti-Communism was an acceptable thing for an ex-Nazi to emphasize in the West. If Germans (who might be fathers and grandfathers of the Germans confronting these questions) were after Bolsheviks, then Jews were just in the way; if fascism and communism were equal, then their fathers/grandfathers were fighting evil too. Though Westerners thought of antifascism as imposed on the East from above, by Communist rulers, Neiman suggests that’s too simple. An amazing paragraph:
Between Nazi propaganda about barbaric Bolshevik ordes and their own fear of retaliation for what the Wehrmacht had done in the Soviet Union, most Nazis preferred to await defeat in the American zone. This meant that East Germany had fewer big fish on their hands from the start, but they tried far more of those Nazis who were left than West Germany did. Most important, although the majority of the population in both East and West had been equally entwined with the Nazi cause, this was not the case with the leadership. East German leaders—in politics, civil service, media, and the arts—were antifascists in their bones, and some of those who survived had paid for it with their blood. West German leaders had been, at the least, complicit …. West Berlin refused to allow resistance heroes to speak of their wartime experiences in public schools because most of those who survived had been communists. In West Germany, serving communism was always worse than serving fascism. This became clear in monetary terms when a new pension law was passed after reunification. The years you may have spent as an SS officer or driving a cattle car to Auschwitz were counted toward your pension. The years you may have spent doing obligatory military service in the GDR or driving an ordinary train there were not.
(In 1953, sufficiently documented Auschwitz survivors could receive $450 for each year spent there, less than the pensions paid to former SS guards and their widows.) That isn’t to say that East Germany didn’t use antifascism “as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression”; she agrees that it did. But even if it was in part a foreign policy tool, antifascism was itself a good thing, just like civil rights legislation in the US that was in part anticommunist propaganda to rebut Soviet critiques of US segregation.
Neiman suggests that the recent rise of right-wing sentiment in the East comes from resentment at longstanding Western scorn for East Germans. This contempt became economic policy: since pensions were calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, and since East Germans had most basics like rent and food subsidized and correspondingly low salaries, they now get less in retirement, and can be furious at refugees getting state support.
Neiman also compares US memory and forgetting, including how James Meredith objects to the monument to him at the University of Mississippi that includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.” But I learned less simply because I already know much more about our history of reckoning with atrocity, or mostly of failing to do so. (I read this months ago, before the news cycle became full of too many whites’ demand that we forget most of our racist history.)
Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future: Kolbert explores aspects of what the natural world will look like as we enter fully into the anthropocene. You know about carbon, but did you know that human fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than the rest of the terrestrial ecosystem, or that we routinely cause earthquakes? People outweigh wild animals by eight to one, and it’s 22 to one if you add in domestic animals. The consequences of our changes are well underway. Louisiana has shrunk by over 2000 square miles since the 1930s, more than Delaware or Rhode Island. Debates over gene editing now must include that the alternative for animals is likely extinction, as well as that our previous attempts at moving genomes around the world in animals or plants have often been disastrous. She talks to a researcher who thinks we need to think about carbon dioxide like sewage: we understand that it wouldn’t help to punish people if they went to the bathroom too often, but we also don’t let them shit on the sidewalk. So she also talks to people who propose geoengineering mitigation solutions, though she characterizes at least some as being like “treating a heroin habit with amphetamines.” But most of her interviewees say some version of: geoengineering is like chemotherapy; you don’t use it because you have better options. One says: “We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.” But only might be.
Jennifer Taub, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime: There’s a lot of corruption, wage theft, and fraud in the US, and we don’t even track it (so when you hear crime has spiked, think about the things we don’t try to count). I don’t think I’d seen this about the GM ignitition switch scandal, where they killed a bunch of people to save money on a part costing less than a dollar and then covered it up: One driver pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she lost control of her car and her boyfriend was killed. For years, the woman believed she was responsible for his death and her own severe injuries, but five months before she pled guilty, GM’s internal review found that the ignition switch was at fault in her accident. GM didn’t tell her; instead, it wrote a letter to NHTSA falsely saying it hadn’t looked at the crash. Seven years after the accident, she was finally cleared. And the lack of prosecution has gotten worse even in the past ten years—even as late as 2006, the DOJ was convicting CEOs, presidents, CFOs, and COOs more regularly. But court decisions and prosecutor timidity have made that far less common. We also help launder money from thieves and corrupt politicians around the world. Our elected officials and administrators could choose differently, if we had the votes and the will.
Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet: Argues that the internet is built on a fundamentally flawed model of ad-supported content with too many intermediaries to allow any certainty that real people, much less the right people, are seeing ads supposedly targeted to them, even before the ever-increasing presence of ad-blockers is taken into account. Rather than publishers being ad-supported, mostly it’s intermediaries sucking out as much as 70 percent of the revenues from an ad. I think the book is basically right except that a bubble can last a lot longer than it should when there don’t seem to be other, better alternatives, which I think is the case here—advertisers have budgets and want to use them. But the critique of targeted advertising—it’s way more expensive than nontargeted ads and often quite inaccurate and permeated with fraud—is persuasive for anyone looking for how they should allocate their ad budgets.
Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America: Uses stories of Baltimore’s free Blacks to explore the complicated ways in which they used citizenship claims and rights claims to reinforce each other, before and even sometimes after Chief Justice Taney declared in the Dred Scott case that Blacks could not be citizens. For example, they pointed out that white women were citizens even though white women couldn’t vote or hold property (in many places) by themselves. Black people filed petitions; they litigated; they made claims in the papers and in the streets. Those tactics didn’t always succeed, and there wasn’t always agreement about the best course of action (including leaving Maryland for the North, or Canada, or even Liberia), but they did claim the status of rights-bearing people.
Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit: Fascinating book. Mears spent several years with party promoters—almost all men, often Black men—who made money by bringing models or attractive “civilians” to high-end clubs so that the clubs would be attractive to big-spending men (usually white US, European, Arab, or Asian men). Acceptable “girls” have to look under thirty, be five foot seven or over and wear heels, and thin—and they are mostly white though a real model is always welcome whatever her race; being “hot” isn’t enough because the clubs want a specific “model” look. The big spenders, the promoters say, want “the real thing” if they’re spending $15,000 a night. The girls are there to dance, mingle, or just be there and look beautiful. “[G]irls are valuable; women are not.”
Mears emphasizes all the work that is required to create these experiences of pleasure and lack of inhibition, where—most visibly—hundreds of bottles of champagne can be wasted in displays of excess that no one seems willing to fully endorse while they’re not experiencing it. Almost every client Mears interviewed criticized staged displays of waste, but defended their own large bills. Because of the biggest “whales,” “even the biggest spenders could see their purchases as relatively modest.” Some also attributed the worst excesses to ethnic others: Russians and Saudis. Or they attributed them to people who didn’t work to earn their money, the way they themselves did. One line: “Despite securing his enviable hedge fund job at his family’s firm after having just graduated from an unexceptional college, Ricardo insisted and seemed to genuinely believe that his income reflected his hard work.” It was common for male clients to say that they deserved occasional indulgences because they worked so hard, and also that it was an important way to network with potential business partners.
The distinctions get even more complicated, because the richest men are often comped drinks because of the expectation that they’ll bring even more business, like holding a party at the club or investing in the owner’s next venture. So most clubs make the bulk of their profits from $1500 to $3000 tables populated by “affluent tourists and businessmen” who “regularly run up high-volume tabs because they, too, want to be close to power and beauty,” but who aren’t comped. (They might avoid having to pay a high table minimum if they come in with three or four models, though.)
Conspicuous consumption doesn’t just happen; people around rich people have to work very hard “to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.” She focuses on “the backstage work of vulnerable women and marginalized men,” in which girls are “a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” Clubs let clients “act out domination over each other and over girls’ bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly …. In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.”
And of course the clients and business owners don’t think of the girls as people who might have interesting minds or careers; there is a constant risk of stigmatization as a sex worker, which also usefully functions to limit what girls might ask for. While men used girls to make friends and deals, girls “who demanded a share of profits, in the form of financial support or gifts, were deemed users, schemers, and whores.” This is what Mears means when she says that female beauty was worth more to the men who traded in it than to the women who theoretically had it. Relatedly, the labor required for the girls to be present in the clubs is invisible, assumed to be leisure. Club owners pay promoters thousands of dollars to bring a group of high-quality models in, but owners or promoters would never pay the women themselves to attend, because that wouldn’t be authentic (and many girls would have found that unpleasant, feeling too much like work). Most girls didn’t know how much promoters made, and generally estimated that promoters earned a lot less than they actually did.
Mears also emphasizes that these are complicated mixtures of pleasure, work, and exploitation for both the “girls” and the promoters, who act as friends and often errand runners, housing providers and/or sexual partners for the girls. (Girls rarely have sex with actual clients; the main point is to show off an excess of female beauty, just like the empty champagne bottles that were sprayed around show off the ability to waste alcohol.) The girls get to go exclusive places they couldn’t afford on their own, including foreign locales, but they have to go out and hang out in the clubs in return. The relational work the promoters did highlights that “exploitation works best when it feels good.” The promoters, who are rarely from higher class backgrounds, often think that they’ll be able to join the big spenders who will eventually back their own business ventures—and this has even happened to a few promoters turned club owners—but mostly they too are providing a service and are ultimately replaceable.
Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire: Updates Stone’s previous book from the last ten years or so, including a bit on the acceleration of Amazon’s dominance wrought by the pandemic. Some interesting tidbits, including about Bezos’s apparently genuine commitment to the independence of the Washington Post. He did have some ideas: he wondered whether the paper would need so many editors if it hired great writers. In order to get him off this tack, some editors took to sending them their highest-profile reporters’ unedited copy, and eventually he stopped pushing the idea, though Amazon denied that Bezos read the emails. Consistent with his hostility to unions, Bezos did ditch the perfectly stable pension fund for new employees, replacing it with 401(k)s. Stone also reports on Amazon’s struggles with video as it made deals with Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, while the video business was headed by a guy who also allegedly mistreated women.
Stone provides further confirmation that Amazon employees did peek at third-party sellers’ data to give their house brands competitive advantages, despite Amazon’s official denials that this occurred. Some of this seems like a good idea. “For example, customer reviews in the all-important category of dog poop bags indicated regular confusion about which end of the bag opened. So the Amazon Basics version included a blue arrow and the words ‘open this end.’” Amazon defends this kind of data analysis as being open to anyone who cared to do it, and many of the house brands don’t seem to be harming established brands, but several house brand managers admitted to exploiting something a lot harder to compete with: access to prominence in Amazon search results. When they introduced a new brand, Amazon brand managers could give it an initial “relevancy score” matched to that of an established product, making it appear at the top of search results instead of “starting on the unseen last page with other new brands.” Amazon officially denies this, but I have no doubt that Stone’s anonymous informants told the truth.
Amazon’s reputation for predation certainly doesn’t get better from this book overall. One telling story involves a high level employee departing for Target. “Here was one of the more naked hypocrisies at Amazon, which aggressively poached employees from competitors but considered it an act of absolute treachery when an executive left for a rival.” Only expensive lawyers eventually eased the executive’s slowed-down transition.