Salon: The deep roots of “white trash” in America: “Not only are we not a post-racial society, we are certainly not a post-class society”

Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash” begins by looking at the characters in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Both the book and the movie play with the divide between Atticus Finch, who is saintly and proper, and the poor white family, the Ewells, whose daughter’s false rape accusation is at the story’s center, as an example that there are two kinds of white people in the South. The book has been on Isenberg’s curriculum for 15 years, as part of a history class called “Crime, Conspiracy, and Courtroom Dramas,” which she teaches at Louisiana State University. [...]

I became interested in figuring out the language: how do Americans talk about the poor? And then I realized that this is connected to the larger problem Americans have about class, that they believe a myth. We are told over and over again by writers, sometimes journalists, but mainly politicians, that we are an exceptional country, that we embrace the American dream. And what’s that rooted to this idea that we believe in social mobility. And we think that that idea, that promise, goes all the way back to the American revolution, that at that moment we broke free from the British system and that somehow we unburdened ourselves from the English class system. Now this is a problem that Americans have – they often prefer the myth over reality. [...]

One of the other really strange things that I think we’ve forgotten about the way in which race and class get intertwined. If you look at the embrace of social Darwininsm and evolutionary theory, and again this is building on the old ideas of animal husbandry, that you can breed people the way you breed dogs, there is the idea that poor whites are evolutionarily backward, they are unevolved people. And this particularly gets attached to those who live in Appalachia, the hillbilly. At the end of the 19th century there’s an attempt to recover these people as a kind of purer Anglo Saxon, that they have been protected from being corrupted. But the dominant theme is that they have not evolved at all. 

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The Guardian: Playful German street photography – in pictures

“Street photography is all about accidents” says Max Slobodda, a photographer from Germany whose Merge series captures people, and occasionally animals, appearing to melt into their surroundings. Taken around the Ruhr Valley, Düsseldorf and Cologne over the past two years, the photographs are part of an ongoing project in which, Slobodda says, each image “unites humans with their environment”. While some of them were planned, Slobodda emphasises the spontaneous nature of his photography. “Lots of my best were taken when I was already on my way somewhere with just a couple of minutes to spare to catch my bus or train.”

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Salon: Death in Dallas and America’s existential crisis: Our new “civil war” over the nature of reality

That fact lies at the heart of our deepening national crisis, which goes beyond political disagreement or racial conflict into existential or epistemological realms. There was nothing exceptional about this week’s body count, sadly, although the Dallas attacks unquestionably got the entire nation’s attention. But certain aspects of our current situation are new and striking. There was a certain grim hilarity to Donald Trump’s post-Dallas Facebook lament that “Our nation has become too divided,” which is roughly like Count Dracula complaining that all the pretty girls in Transylvania have become vampires. But you can’t argue with the sentiment. We are an intensely divided country — in terms of race, culture and ideology, of course, but also in terms of basic facts and how to understand them. This profound disconnection is not without precedent, because American history is full of echoes. History also teaches us that such division holds great danger. [...]

For better or worse, we have abandoned the notion of a shared mainstream culture and embraced a radical subjectivity worthy of 1980s critical theory. Experts and authority figures can be cast aside anytime we don’t like what they say; science is understood as a matter of opinion, and the difference between science and opinion is itself a matter of opinion. Some aspects of that iconoclasm have been healthy, like the realization that we have all been shaped by cultural forces we may not perceive, and that none of us is free of bias. But the technology that has connected us and made us so self-aware has also isolated us in electronic cocoons that magnify our existing prejudices and reflect them back at us. Archie Bunker minus the running arguments with Meathead, plus Fox News, leads to Donald Trump. [...]

As we can see from the reactions to this week’s dreadful events on the competing news channels and social media, it’s not overstating the case at all to say that we have a “liberal” reality and a “conservative” reality. (I would argue that both words have been stripped of their original meanings and are virtually useless, but never mind.) In one version, the greatest nation in the world has come under sustained attack both at home and abroad, and its enemies — big-government socialists, the identity-politics thought police, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gays and Spanish-speaking immigrants and “radical Islam” and Barack Hussein Obama — share a common agenda and are quite likely working together. In another, evil corporations and embittered white racists have forged a nightmare coalition devoted to rolling back every progressive reform of the last 80 years and turning 21st-century America into a “Doctor Who”-style mashup of Victorian England, “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

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Deutsche Welle: A study contradicts efforts to link migrants to crime

The Berlin-based pro-migration group Mediendienst Integration (Integration Media Service) has presented a study authored by the Münster criminologist Christian Walburg that claims to refute any link between national origin and crime. The study is based primarily on statistics from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office.

Walburg told DW that there had been no increase in the number offenses per 100,000 people for the most common types of crimes. However, he said there had been two areas that had indeed shown significant increases: burglaries and pickpocketing. [...]

Sandra Bucerius, a criminologist from the University of Alberta, has arrived at even more surprising results. For years, she has examined the relationship between migration in crime in Canada, which has a long history of immigration.

"The studies in the international arena are clear," Bucerius told DW. "Clear in the sense that immigration tends to reduce national crime rates and not raise them."

Bucerius said, however, that the second generation, or the children of migrants, often would show an increase in crime - and that a particularly strong risk factor is a lack of social integration. This has worked out better in countries that have been traditional destinations for migrants than in European countries that do not consider themselves as such, she said: "Alongside a welcome culture, the point could be made that a welcome structure is also needed."

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