#251: The Model Minority Myth Hurts Us All

David Dennis Jr.: “Black people disappear in America. This fact is woven into the fabric of our country. Parents are separated from their children at slave auctions, never to be seen by them again. A loved one is here one day and turns up in the Jim Crow woods the next, dangling from trees under the cover of nightfall and inhumanity. Ahmaud Arbery left his house on February 23 to go for a run, as the 25-year-old former high school football star was known to do. In the middle of that run, he became one of those bodies. Ahmaud was in the middle-class Satilla Shores neighborhood, on a winding road under the cover of Spanish moss that hung from trees like history. It’s the type of road Black bodies disappear into.” (19 min)

Everyone in the village of Bethel, Ohio, loves second grade teacher Lois Dennis. That is, they loved her — until she participated in a Black Lives Matter demonstration with her daughter last month. The town of 2,800 mostly white residents turned on her, claiming that Bethel isn’t racist and doesn’t need to examine its values. For this working-class, Trump-voting community, white privilege doesn’t exist and BLM amounts to reverse racism. (26 min)

+ Read more by Anne Helen Petersen on millennial burnout, college debt, and farmhouse-chic.

Discount stores are thriving, particularly in poor areas, which Walmart and Target won’t serve. But this outstanding piece by Alec MacGillis explains how dollar stores contribute to economic distress rather than mitigating it, especially in working-class Black communities. Keeping prices down means poor working conditions, low wages, and worst of all, high rates of robbery and murder. When you go to work, Jolanda Woods says, you shouldn’t have to risk your life. (28 min)