Category: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

The Meaning of the Democrats’ Spending Spree

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New Yorker here.

“If anything, the A.R.P. is defensive legislation, reacting to the crisis but lacking an offensive strategy to reverse the worsening inequality in the U.S. The federal government will help people pay for health care if they lose their jobs, but the system of for-profit health care is left untouched. Billions will be made available for rental assistance, but the unaffordability of housing remains the same. Millions of Americans will continue to struggle with debilitating debt, and to live on the federal minimum wage, which is still absurdly less than eight dollars an hour. This new spending is necessary but not nearly enough to dig ordinary Americans out of the hole created by decades of political neglect.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

Black America Has Reason to Question Authorities

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from Thhe New Yorker here.

“The skepticism among the Black public is not rooted in the same kind of anti-scientific sentiment that has motivated those small communities that reject vaccines in general. Instead, Black concerns are enmeshed within a history of Black health care that is replete with acts of cruelty and depravity and has caused Black communities to regard the health-care professions with warranted suspicion. More important, racism in the provision of medical treatment in the United States has tainted the ways that health-care professionals view Black suffering and symptoms, and Black bodies, more generally.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Limits of Representation

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New Yorker, here.

“We are living in the recent shadow of a two-term Black President and two Black Attorneys General. And, despite this unprecedented concentration of Black political power, not much has changed for the vast majority of Black people. This was certainly true before the ravages of COVID-19 measured the exact depths of racial injustice in the country. There may be a multitude of contextual factors and contingencies that explain the impotence of the Black political class to change the conditions experienced by ordinary Black people, but those explanations do not change that basic reality.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

The End of Black Politics

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New York Times, here.

“The revolt in American cities, amid a deadly pandemic that is disproportionately killing African-Americans, suggests that people feel the political system cannot solve their problems. Many have been looking back at the urban uprisings of the 1960s to make sense of our situation. Those protests exposed a shocking degree of racism in the supposedly liberal North. A main demand from protesters then was more black political control of cities.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

Joe Biden’s Success Shows We Gave Obama a Free Pass

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New York Times, here.

“Mr. Obama’s free pass is also extended to Joe Biden who has strong support among black voters. But we won’t really know the sustenance of Mr. Biden’s black support until the South Carolina primaries. Mrs. Clinton also had deep black support in 2008 — until she didn’t. If there looks like an ‘electable’ alternative he might be in trouble.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

Succeeding While Black

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from Boston Review, here.

“The point is not to impose onto or require a more radical viewpoint from Obama when she does not have one, but rather to expose her ultimately conservative message. Obama served as an inspiring role model—her personal story is extraordinary by any measure. But it is crucial for both her and us to acknowledge that it was made possible by the confluence of institutional changes and her own talents.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

How Real Estate Segregated America

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from Dissent, here.

“The subprime mortgage crisis, and the wider housing and economic crisis it produced, was the culmination of a long period of predatory inclusion of African Americans in the housing market, which can be traced back to the era of housing and credit reform in the late 1960s and 1970s. After decades of exclusion, African Americans were finally promised access to the robust housing market that had fueled the ascension of the white middle class in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

In Baltimore and Across the Country, Black Faces in High Places Haven’t Helped Average Black People

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from In These Times, here.

“Fewer than 40 miles from Baltimore, in the nation’s capitol, resides the nation’s first African-American president. There are 43 Black members of Congress and two Senators—the highest number of Black Congress members in American history. And just as the West Side of Baltimore was erupting against the police killing of Freddie Gray, Loretta Lynch became the first Black woman appointed as Attorney General.”

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