Illusions Revolt!

US Customs and Border Patrol BY   Gordon Lynch , University of Kent After weeks of mounting pressure, Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 20 to stop his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border of the US. Putting the policy into a wider historical context of state-sanctioned policies of child separation helps to understand why some aspects of it were remarkably distinctive – and caused such international outrage. From the closing decades of the 19th century, an array of policies emerged across the Anglophone world which challenged assumptions about parents’ inalienable rights to their children. A transnational child protection movement led to the formation of child protection societies, beginning with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1875. New legislation followed in the UK, Canada and Australia allowing the removal of children from parents on grounds of cruelty ...

By   Elizabeth Sherman , American University School of Public Affairs Arizona Sen. John McCain – scion of Navy brass , flyboy turned Vietnam war hero and tireless defender of American global leadership – now faces terminal brain cancer . I am a scholar of American politics . And I believe that, regardless of his storied biography and personal charm, three powerful trends in American politics thwarted McCain’s lifelong ambition to be president. They were the rise of the Christian right, partisan polarization and declining public support for foreign wars. Republican McCain was a champion of bipartisan legislating , an approach that served him and the Senate well. But as political divides have grown, bipartisanship has fallen out of favor. Most recently, McCain opposed Gina Haspel as CIA director for “her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality” and her role in it. Having survived brutal torture for five years as a prisoner of war, McCain maintained a resolute...

Stormy Daniels, an adult star, at a local restaurant in downtown New Orleans.    AP Photo/Bill HaberBy By  Kelsy Burke , University of Nebraska-Lincoln Many commentators have pointed out the hypocrisy of Christian leaders who claim a moral high ground while supporting President Donald Trump. The latest scandal involving an alleged extramarital affair with pornographic film star Stormy Daniels proves no exception. The Christian right that supports Trump has found ways to justify their support of the president, for example, with analogies of how God used King David , a man with personal flaws, for the greater good of the country. All the while, however, evangelical leaders remain definitively opposed to pornography. In the words of an evangelical celebrity and outspoken opponent of pornography, Josh McDowell, it is “probably the greatest problem or threat to the Christian faith in the history of the world.” As a sociologist who stud...

Our data analysis shows that the Trump administration is less likely than its predecessor to find wrongdoing by school districts on issues ranging from racial and sexual harassment to meeting educational needs of disabled students. by Annie Waldman June 21, 2018 Whether schoolchildren in DeSoto County, Mississippi, are paddled varies by their race. Black students are almost two and a half times more likely than whites to endure the corporal punishment permitted under school district policy for skipping class, insubordination, repeated tardiness, flagrant dress code violations, or other misbehavior : up to three “licks per incident on the buttocks with an appropriate instrument approved by the principal.” Black students in DeSoto — a suburban area just south of Memphis, Tennessee — are also more prone to face other forms of school discipline. While comprising 35 percent of district enrollment, they account for 55 percent of suspensions and expulsions, and more than 6...

           JoeyCheung/Shutterstock.com By   Simon Gottschalk , University of Nevada, Las Vegas In the 1950s, scholars worried that , thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time. Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes , Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society. It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.” It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness. Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “ The T...

'Map' via www.shutterstock.com By   Allison Skinner , Northwestern University One might wonder how a country that’s becoming increasingly diverse – some projections have the country becoming majority minority by 2060 – is witnessing a resurgence of white nationalist movements that used to exist on the margins of American politics. As a psychologist who studies social attitudes and biases, I am interested in the impact that increasing diversity and social progress can have on racial attitudes. In a recent study , a colleague and I analyzed how simple reminders of diversity and minority power can influence biases. The results show that the growth of minority populations in the United States could mean that xenophobic, racist rhetoric is more likely to resonate with many Americans. How diversity influences racial attitudes For the study we recruited 202 white people from across the country. We divided them into three groups. One group read excerpt...

Jeff Bezos is now the richest person in the world. Reed Saxon/AP Photo By   Andrew D. Hwang , College of the Holy Cross The world’s wealthiest are prospering. As of February 2017, there were about 2,000 billionaires in the world . This micro-elite controls over US$7.6 trillion , an increase of 18 percent from 2016. A billionaire’s spending power is difficult to grasp, both because most people do not correctly intuit large numbers , and because a billion dollars far outstrips most people’s experience. What does a household budget look like to a billionaire? To find out, let’s scale down a billionaire’s income to $50,000, the median American income , adjusting budget items proportionally. A year in the life of Joe Billionaire To start, we need to estimate a billionaire’s annual income. In the 30 years from 1987 to 2016, Bill and Melinda Gates amassed about $120 billion. This figure represents $80 billion in net worth and $40 bill...