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Poverty

Class & Inequality, Global Justice

What 30 Percent Unemployment Looks Like

As we know from South Africa's crisis, political and social fault lines will shape the contours of joblessness.

Nicholas Rush Smith

Class & Inequality

Deaths of Despair

Boston Review talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton about COVID-19, the relationship between culture, financial hardship, and health, and why capitalism’s flaws are proving fatal for America’s working class. 

Joshua Cohen, Angus Deaton

Race

COVID-19 and the Color Line

Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis. This is the result of racist policies which collapsed the social safety net while setting blacks in the path of danger.

Colin Gordon, Walter Johnson, Jason Q. Purnell, Jamala Rogers

Class & Inequality

COVID-19 and Welfare Queens

Conservatives have long been sounding the alarm about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance. These fears have deep ties to racism and the policing of black women’s bodies.

Scott W. Stern

Class & Inequality

What a Solidarity Economy Looks Like

Despite President Bolsonaro's COVID-19 denialism, a small Brazilian city has one of the most ambitious responses in the world.

Paul Katz, Leandro Ferreira

Class & Inequality

Should There Be a COVID-19 Rent Strike?

While the government and some banks have announced mortgage moratoriums, they have not insisted that rent relief be passed on to tenants. Many renters don’t know what they will do come April 1, let alone May 1.

Mordecai Lyon

Class & Inequality

The War Against the Poor Knows No Borders

The Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran and cuts to SNAP benefits are two sides of the same war that the rich are waging against the global poor.

Liz Theoharis

Class & Inequality, Race

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.

Walter Johnson

Class & Inequality, Global Justice

Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah

Kenya's poor were among the first to benefit from digital lending apps; now they call it slavery.

Kevin P. Donovan, Emma Park

Forum

How Race Made the Opioid Crisis

The success of OxyContin hinged on racially bifurcated understandings of addiction. The fundamental division between “dope” and medicine, after all, has always been the race and class of users.

Donna Murch

Class & Inequality

Homes for Citizens

New York public housing is plagued with problems, but it possesses a democratic advantage that voucher systems lack: residents can hold the state accountable not only as tenants but as constituents.

Salonee Bhaman, Pedro A. Regalado

Law & Justice

The Metastasis of the Misdemeanor System

The misdemeanor system is four times the size of the felony system. With so many gradations of minor crimes—many involving fines in a very informal process—prejudice and inequality shapes prosecution.

Brandon L. Garrett

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THINKING IN A PANDEMIC

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