Pamela Oliver
Activists in Wisconsin’s Close MSDF coalition are focusing attention on the inhumane conditions in the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility (MSDF) and the problem of crimeless revocations that send people there. The MSDF was built in 2001 to house people temporarily who had been accused of violating the terms of their
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NOTE: See Josh Bloom’s comments. Other comments are welcome. They are moderated to avoid spam and trolls, but serious engagement with the issues is welcomed. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panthers, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., has received wide praise for its
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In a pre-class survey, I asked my students questions about their own racial/ethnic backgrounds and the types of places they have lived in. Race first, where I grouped the “mixed” race answers for people who combined White with Latinx or Black into the minority group for this table. This course
Read moreWhen we teach race, we must have a vocabulary so we can talk about race. Students need to know which words are preferred, which are contested, which are now likely to offend but were never used as insults in their time, and which are unambiguous insults that should not be
Read moreFor nearly 30 years, I’ve taught “Ethnic Movements in the US,” which takes a social movements approach to comparing the history and politics of American Indians, African Americans, Latinx Americans, and Asian Americans. This course meets the ethnic studies requirement and attracts both students who are actually interested in the
Read moreAs a citizen and human being, I have watched the recent news coming out of Charlottesville with the same horror as many others have felt. White nationalists displaying Nazi symbols, brawling, and someone purposely driving a car into a crowd are all upsetting. As a scholar of social movements and
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In my previous posts, I showed that White imprisonment has been growing more in rural areas than urban areas, and that this is tied to the fact that rural places are much more likely to have high poverty rates and low average educational levels. In this post, I follow up
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In a previous post, I showed how the White imprisonment rate rose in rural counties even as the Black and White imprisonment rates in metropolitan areas fell. In this post, I show that the White rural-urban difference in imprisonment is linked to the White rural-urban difference in poverty and education,
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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the northern half of Mexico to US control.* It is a central document in US history, as well as in Mexican history. The “Mexican cession” as it is somewhat euphemistically called, is central to the construction of the US nation. Forgetting the cession is
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Unremarked until very recently* , there is a hidden story to be told about the rise in White incarceration in the United States to supplement the story about the mass incarceration of Black people I and many others have been writing about for years. The White story has been going
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