Worth Reading: August 2021

Weekly Reader

If he ever conceded so, Obama would likely insist nevertheless that the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as maintaining faith in the American project. “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama writes in another excerpt published in The Atlantic, “not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.” But he clearly understands, too, as Biden surely does on some level, that our situation is bleak. “I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide,” he writes. “In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.” It’s a passage far less inspirational than it is chilling—evidence that as determinedly as he might disparage cynicism, Obama knows exactly what horrors await us in the years to come and that the curmudgeons and cranks on the left are, again, substantively correct about the trajectory we’re on.

But this collection and operationalization of biometric data — at the border, at the entrance to an office, on the floor of a warehouse — is not some neutral means for assessing the risk a given individual poses, with respect to Covid-19 or any other hazard, any more than biometric data in general simply represents the reality or perceived reality of someone’s identity. Such biometric forms of control replicate already existing biases about who must bear the brunt of surveillance technologies, marking out particular populations for more intensive scrutiny. This was true when concerns about terrorism after 9/11 led to the sorting of foreign workers, immigrants, asylum seekers, and noncitizens into “desirable” and “undesirable” categories, as David Lyon explains in Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life. It was also true with predictive-policing algorithms, which, as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne have intensively catalogued, were first deployed against Black populations.

The great myth that underpins policing in the United States is that it remains a purely local affair, with police responding to the safety needs of individual neighborhoods. Setting aside the numerous federal law enforcement agencies, the grants to municipalities from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and the nationwide professional and fraternal organizations that cops belong to, what unifies police in the United States today is their global reach. It is common today to hear criticisms of the militarization of US policing. But beneath this trend is a much-older process that has ebbed and flowed over time: the globalization of US policing.

Debs’s approach to the “popularity question” differs from one of his ideological heirs, Bernie Sanders. After languishing in minor party obscurity through the 1970s, Sanders dropped the most radical planks of his platform (including socializing the economy’s commanding heights) and gained political office by pursuing policies thwarted not by lack of popularity but by the plutocratic order. Often, his goal has been less to gainsay prevailing opinion — though he’s done plenty of that, too — than to press for public sentiment to be reflected in public policy. Popular social democratic reforms like taxing the rich, funding public programs, and boosting worker power are his bread and butter.

If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.

Weekly Reader

Feminism is often defined by the idea of “choice.” I would like to choose to wake up every day in a society that values me and all other women workers—to have a guaranteed union job, fair wages, social housing, healthcare, child care if I am able to become a mother. Instead, I am told I must choose between scrambling for access to those things, or dying. I could call this for what it is: anti-woman behavior—or sexism. And any other woman could tell me that actually I am the one being sexist for calling these things sexist: it’s my privilege talking; other women would kill to be in my shoes. I know this to be true and I also know that I am allowed to be angry about the ways I and other women suffer. And I also know that conditions for me and for all the women I love can become far worse than they are right now. My desire for a basic social safety net is, in a way, selfish: I want to have a good life. I believe that I deserve that. But I also want the same for everyone else—because I know that ultimately, we are all connected. It’s the same reason that higher union density means higher wages and better benefits even for non-union workers. A rising tide lifts all boats—and a perfect storm of a pandemic and economic recession could sink them. This is the basis of solidarity: if you fall, I could fall too. I am with every single working woman because I am a working woman too, and because I can’t have a good life without them also having a good life. I may suffer less than they do now, but because they are suffering, I am with them. And because they are suffering, I could lose everything and suffer more, too.


The language introduced in the conversations around #MeToo and other mainstream feminist campaigns revealed the power imbalances and types of coercion that might exist within these heterosexual age-gap couplings. But while this language helped to illuminate how men in positions of authority can use their power to coerce or circumvent consent, it also implied that a small segment of the movement believes that men inherently hold authority or power. Implying that all men possess inherent power also implies that they must possess power over something or someone else. The harm in this is that it necessarily insinuates that all women have a power deficit, if not total powerlessness. Through this lens, every heterosexual coupling is subject to scrutiny, lest a man get away with abusing his power over a defenseless young woman. Of course the female subject, awash in feelings and hormones and femininity, is insufficient as the primary judge of whether her relationship is problematic.