I would be interested in your response to this: https://x.com/DavidpStein/status/2082207325960704298?s=20 concerning the assessment of the paper "Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Money: Racial Capitalism, Stagflation, and Unemployment as Economic Policy." Is the goal just to sanitize scholarly research in favor of feel-good stories?
We certainly do not want to "sanitize scholarly research in favor of feel-good stories." We make clear in the report that it's highly appropriate to criticize America. However, there are good aspects to write about as well, and American Quarterly's articles over a three year period feature none that emphasize the positive.
To be clear, an article being critical does not mean it's inaccurate. We assessed the publication in the aggregate for its approach to America.
As to the paper "Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Money," it includes some positive words about civil rights leaders but its thrust is clearly critical.
Here is a representative quotation: "During this era, existing relations of racism, patriarchy, and other social systems of difference were renovated and provided explanatory paradigms for policymakers' choices, as they fabricated monetary stability on the backs of the most vulnerable."
I think a lot of the people in this field - as well as similar ones- want to be more than scholars, they want to be scholar-activists and use their work to push for (in their view) positive changes. Others have noted that this might not be a great path for the academy as a whole to go down, but even if you grant that activism is something the university should be doing, is this kind of purely negative activism actually effective? I think there is finally a realization in climate circles that only highlighting bad news has been counterproductive, in that a number of otherwise persuadable people just tune out: “oh well, no matter what, things keep getting worse. Is there any point to even try to fight this?” Highlighting progress is important, because it demonstrates that progress is possible.
What part of this looks like to me, and what to me serves as part of the massive confusion that the Democrats are experiencing right now, is an unwillingness to concede that most if not all of the major civil rights battles have been litigated. The Left simply will not admit that the Civil Rights era is over and so, it cannot see that there are entirely new and different tasks ahead for the country to tackle if the country is to remain coherent and stable.
The battles now consist almost entirely of economic questions but those are hard and few in the activist Left, in my experience, want to grapple with deep reforms of our system economically that also don't involve destroying the system we currently have.
If the problem with your work was that the analysis was simplistic, they should be able to come up with a counterexample among the papers. It doesn't look like they did not do so?
I would be interested in your response to this: https://x.com/DavidpStein/status/2082207325960704298?s=20 concerning the assessment of the paper "Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Money: Racial Capitalism, Stagflation, and Unemployment as Economic Policy." Is the goal just to sanitize scholarly research in favor of feel-good stories?
We certainly do not want to "sanitize scholarly research in favor of feel-good stories." We make clear in the report that it's highly appropriate to criticize America. However, there are good aspects to write about as well, and American Quarterly's articles over a three year period feature none that emphasize the positive.
To be clear, an article being critical does not mean it's inaccurate. We assessed the publication in the aggregate for its approach to America.
As to the paper "Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Money," it includes some positive words about civil rights leaders but its thrust is clearly critical.
Here is a representative quotation: "During this era, existing relations of racism, patriarchy, and other social systems of difference were renovated and provided explanatory paradigms for policymakers' choices, as they fabricated monetary stability on the backs of the most vulnerable."
I think a lot of the people in this field - as well as similar ones- want to be more than scholars, they want to be scholar-activists and use their work to push for (in their view) positive changes. Others have noted that this might not be a great path for the academy as a whole to go down, but even if you grant that activism is something the university should be doing, is this kind of purely negative activism actually effective? I think there is finally a realization in climate circles that only highlighting bad news has been counterproductive, in that a number of otherwise persuadable people just tune out: “oh well, no matter what, things keep getting worse. Is there any point to even try to fight this?” Highlighting progress is important, because it demonstrates that progress is possible.
What part of this looks like to me, and what to me serves as part of the massive confusion that the Democrats are experiencing right now, is an unwillingness to concede that most if not all of the major civil rights battles have been litigated. The Left simply will not admit that the Civil Rights era is over and so, it cannot see that there are entirely new and different tasks ahead for the country to tackle if the country is to remain coherent and stable.
The battles now consist almost entirely of economic questions but those are hard and few in the activist Left, in my experience, want to grapple with deep reforms of our system economically that also don't involve destroying the system we currently have.
If the problem with your work was that the analysis was simplistic, they should be able to come up with a counterexample among the papers. It doesn't look like they did not do so?