The question for people like King, and for progressives in general, is whether or not they really want to oppose mass incarceration and our current police state. Because that edifice is so powerful, and so deeply embedded into our system, that it will take a genuinely unified front to oppose it. That means not siding with the police against white and Hispanic bikers who were, indeed, up to no good and are probably not very good people. What’s the priority? Scoring the purely rhetorical point of identifying privilege? Or actually transforming the system that hurts so many poor people and people of color?
On 8 June, the Japanese Minister of National Education, Hakubun Shimomura, informed the presidents of the 86 universities of the country that they “should close its departments of humanities and social sciences or to change them in order to meet the needs of society more adequately.” It called for “focussing on the areas of study that are useful to the economy”.
