… into newly contentious waters. One owner of eight rental properties in North Carolina posted a blog about her hatred of both landlord and tenant because, in her words, “I don’t believe that there is a hierarchy in the relationship between me, the homeowner, and our clients who choose to rent our homes,” she wrote. Except that the hierarchy is very real, and very clear. As Oksana Mironova, housing policy analyst at Community Service Society of New York, puts it, “A conversation about power is instead becoming a conversation about who is being mean to someone else.” Despite their feelings of pe…

Truly the affliction of our age.

I have a half-believed theory in my head that this has to do with how we tried to teach children about structural injustice with Very Special Episodes that have to reduce it to The Cartoon Rabbit Made The Cartoon Mouse Feel Bad, So That’s Bad, Right? As the first thing they learned, this then becomes people’s idea of the essence of injustice, with the structural/historical stuff as some kind of elaboration1.

  1. This is my only way of trying to construct a good-faith understanding of how people get to a point of “affirmative action is actually racism.” ↩