Features

Stanford University is one of eight schools where wealthy parents fraudulently secured spots for their children as part of a nationwide college admissions bribery scheme. HarshLight, via Flickr
Commentary

Meritocracy’s Casualties

The individualist credo is exacerbating already steep inequality and driving elites to protect their privilege by any means—even criminal ones.


The college admissions scandal that implicated Hollywood stars and other wealthy parents produced its first convictions in September, with actor Felicity Huffman among the growing list of those sentenced to prison time for engaging in bribery and fraud to get their children into a selective college (though in Huffman’s case for a short term of fourteen days). The nature of this scandal—which involved FBI wiretaps, paid-off SAT proctors, and even doctored photos of students playing sports—turned an intense media spotlight on the spectacularly unethical behavior of certain well-off families. But the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper problem in modern American life: widening income inequality and the destructive competition it engenders across the class divide.

When income inequality rises, the stakes of the economic game rise. Where children end up along a steep gradient of academic achievement matters all the more for their chances later in life. For example, in 2018, edging your way into the top 5 percent of earners would have made your household $119,000 richer than one that had just made it into the top 20 percent; back in 1978, that difference was just $56,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Because every step up the ladder pays off more, parents feel greater pressure to do all they can to improve their kids’ prospects. The payoff for cheating grows, too—even elaborate frauds of the sort that William Rick Singer and his team allegedly perpetrated to get his high-profile clients’ kids into Stanford, Yale, the University of Southern California, and other schools. (Singer, who pleaded guilty to fraud and a host of other criminal charges in March, admitted to bribing university administrators and colluding with wealthy parents to secure admission for their children.)

Beyond the ranks of celebrities and the elite, economic anxieties abound. It has become commonplace to observe that children from middle-class families are less likely to achieve a better standard of living than their parents. And as those chances dwindle, a greater burden falls on children and their parents to ensure their future success.

Continue reading Meritocracy’s Casualties →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Danish Rajab, a former salesman in his early twenties, was shot by a pellet gun during anti-India protests near his home in Srinagar in 2016. He lost his job after his injuries made it impossible to work. After three surgeries, he can still only see blurry images from his left eye. Photo by Sharafat Ali
Srinagar
News

Dead Eyes

The dispute over Kashmir has raged for seven decades and ignited three wars. Now the conflict has entered a new phase: violent street protests in India-controlled Kashmir, followed by brutal crackdowns by Indian security forces that have maimed a new generation of militants, protesters, and bystanders.

Umer Beigh

Hiba Nisar was eighteen months old when she became the youngest casualty of the latest phase in the deadly, decades-long conflict in Kashmir. Last November, protesters clashed with Indian security forces outside her home in Kapran, a village in the south of the Muslim-majority state controlled by India but also claimed by Pakistan. As protesters pelted them with stones, Indian police fired tear gas, which began to seep into Hiba’s home. Hiba started to choke.

Her mother, Marsala Jan, grabbed her and opened the door, intent on getting her out of the smoke. “As I sneaked out, I heard a loud bang,” Jan recalls—the security forces had fired their shotguns. A spray of lead pellets ripped through the doorway. Jan had covered her daughter’s face with her hand, but a pellet went through her hand, she says, and into Hiba’s left eye.

Hiba was partially blinded. “Fate struck a terrible blow,” Jan says. “I held my child tight, but … I failed to protect her eye.”

Since 2010, Indian security forces have used pellet guns to deal with widespread protests in Kashmir, leading to the blinding, maiming, or killing of hundreds of people, according to human rights advocates and local medical personnel. While the term “pellet gun” brings to mind a children’s toy, the pellets—also known as birdshot—are metal and spray over a wide area. Most countries do not use them for crowd-control purposes because they cannot be aimed and thus cause indiscriminate injury.

Continue reading Dead Eyes →

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A portrait of Kamal, a refugee from Darfur. Painting by Linnéa Spransy
New Haven, Connecticut
Commentary

I’ll Jump When I See Them

The travel bans have been in the headlines, but less reported are the other moves that the Trump administration has made to keep refugees out of the US. For families fleeing war in Sudan and other conflict zones, these policies have taken a toll.


Imagine a Goodwill tucked inside an elementary school, with the energy of a Cairo airport gate. That’s the scene, on busy days, at IRIS, the refugee resettlement agency where I work in New Haven. The downstairs donation space overflows with coats; lamps stand over stacks of pots, pans, and bassinets. Upstairs, refugees from the Middle East and Africa bustle about the hallway with cups of tea and paperwork. Along the walls are world maps and local bus routes, kids’ drawings of airplanes and stars, flashcards for the US citizenship exam.

Working with refugees is unsettling sometimes. Knowing who survived genocide only to get hit by a car, who has trouble eating when he thinks about his mom not having food back home, whose sister tried to get to Europe on a raft—it undoes you sometimes.

Over the last two years, refugee resettlement work has gotten tougher. In 2017, President Trump’s “travel ban” blocked visitors and migrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries and temporarily halted the admission of refugees altogether. The US refugee resettlement program is now operating again, but the Trump administration has taken other, less publicized steps to undermine it—most recently, setting a record-low cap on admissions of just 30,000 refugees for 2019, less than a third of the annual average since 1980.

Continue reading I’ll Jump When I See Them →

Ashley Makar is the community liaison at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, and Killing the Buddha.

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Prague
Commentary

Remembrance of Things Past

Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly forgave one of her former captors before he died last year—at the end, a convicted war criminal. On the seventy-fourth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the long journey to bring one of its SS officers to justice raises questions about the power of forgiveness and the importance of historical memory.


Look at this picture: she is Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, extending her hand to Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer in the camp. The setting: a district court in Lüneburg, Germany, where Gröning was accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. Date: April 2015.

The picture is a conundrum: why would an Auschwitz survivor extend forgiveness to her former captor? Kor’s parents and two of her siblings had perished there. She and her twin sister Miriam had endured the deadly human experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.”

During his trial, Gröning accepted “responsibility in front of God” for what he did at Auschwitz, but he rejected any criminal responsibility. Perhaps so as not to implicate himself further, he refused to show remorse or apologize.

For this and other reasons, none of Kor’s fifty-two co-plaintiffs in the case against the former SS officer followed her lead in publicly forgiving him. Many condemned her for the act.

When I chanced upon the photograph, though, I knew right away why Kor had forgiven Gröning. For I had heard her explain, years earlier, why.

Continue reading Remembrance of Things Past →

Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

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Not all millennials are this damn good-looking—and not all of them are struggling in the ways that working-class millennials generally are. Photo via Flickr.
News

Adulting While Poor

Not all millennials are struggling to reach the traditional milestones of adulthood, but some are—and America’s growing inequality is the reason.


Why can’t millennials afford their own homes? Reading much of the popular press, one is led to believe it’s their unrealistic expectations, indulgent spending, and general allergy to adulthood that have trapped them in a renter’s purgatory. Nebraska senator Ben Sasse wrote a whole book, The Vanishing American Adult, in which he argued that young people today are stuck in a Peter Pan–like state of carefree childhood, spending their time playing video games, buying stuff, and snapping selfies—even posting ironic memes about “adulting”—rather than seeking meaning in career, family, and a stable home.

It is true that millennials have been slower to reach various milestones on the way to an all-American adulthood—including buying a home—than prior generations at the same point in their lives. For example, Americans ages eighteen to thirty-four are now more likely to be living with their parents than in any other housing arrangement, according to 2014 data from the Pew Research Center (which defines millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996). That has never been the case before, according to census data going back to 1880.

A more rigorous explanation for their failure to launch is that the Great Recession stunted millennials’ economic lives at a critical age. As a result, they’re still struggling to obtain gainful employment in a more demanding labor market, or find affordable housing in a contracted mortgage market. In other words, it’s not their lousy values—it’s their lousy economic prospects.

But this line of argument, too, misses something crucial. Its focus on middle-class, if downwardly mobile, millennials obscures just how diverse a generation millennials are. Not all of them are into Snapchat and kombucha juice, that’s for sure, but what’s less appreciated is that not even a majority of them are college-educated. Barely four out of ten Americans between ages twenty-five and thirty-four—members of what will be the most academically credentialed generation ever—have a bachelor’s degree. Thanks in part to the country’s widening income gap, the picture of “how millennials are doing” is dramatically different depending on which segment of the population you happen to be looking at. And to an overlooked degree, what determines whether, when, and how members of this generation attain the traditional markers of adulthood—a house and career, marriage and kids—is one factor: class.

Continue reading Adulting While Poor →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Douglas, Arizona
Commentary

Back to the Wall

Along the US–Mexican border in Arizona, the drug trade persists, but the jobs have long gone. Would building a border wall change anything?


It’s noon during an Arizona July, the temperature upward of 115 degrees, and I’m in the middle of my shift at a neighborhood bar off I-10 in Marana, just north of Tucson. The screen door bangs, startling me. I look up from behind the counter, where I’m putting beers on ice, and see a man wearing cowboy boots, dirt-stained jeans, and a striped blue-and-white dress shirt. “Sorry!” he blurts out in Spanish—he hadn’t known the door would slam so violently behind him. Sweat is pouring down his face, running into his eyes.

Right away I know that he has been crossing the desert. I hand him napkins to wipe away the sweat and motion for him to head over to the bar. He settles onto a stool where he can easily catch the breeze from the fans and swamp cooler. Continue reading Back to the Wall →

Anna Chan is a writer based in Florida.

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Jimmy McMillan, too, wants to put a stop to rent-seeking. David Shankbone, via Flickr
Reviews

Rent Control: A Review of Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’s Captured Economy

Maybe we shouldn’t put too much faith in the hope that the rich will want to rein in their bad behavior.


The rents are too damn high. That’s the conclusion of Brink Lindsey (of the center-right Niskanen Center) and Steven M. Teles (of Johns Hopkins University and Niskanen) in their book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality. By “rents,” Lindsey and Teles don’t mean what you’re late in paying your landlord, but rather “rent” as economists understand it: profits in excess of what a free market would normally allow. In recent years, they argue, large corporations and wealthy individuals have taken larger and larger slices of the economic pie not by creating things of value—inventing the next iPhone-like innovation, say—but by using government policies to quash competition. This involves not just “regulatory capture” (a social-science term for when the industry fox watches the consumer henhouse) but a broader takeover, with all levels of the government—both those who write the rules, and those who enforce them—bending the knee to particular business interests or organized elites.

Continue reading Rent Control: A Review of Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’s Captured Economy →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
US Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles approach the USS Peleliu in Oura Bay, Okinawa. Joshua Hammond (US Navy), via Flickr
Nago, Japan
Interviews

All Your Bases Belong to Us: A Conversation with Japanese Activist Hiroshi Inaba

US military bases occupy a fifth of the Japanese island of Okinawa. The latest round of base construction, says activist Hiroshi Inaba, threatens not only the environment but also the idea that the Okinawan people have a real say over what a foreign military does on their land.

Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson

More than six decades after America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan officially ended, more than 50,000 US troops remain there. Over half of them are stationed on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, an island with a population of 1.3 million, which the United States values as a strategic base close to China and North Korea.

Continue reading All Your Bases Belong to Us: A Conversation with Japanese Activist Hiroshi Inaba →

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Reviews

Collateral Damage: A Review of Helen Benedict’s Wolf Season

Helen Benedict’s novel Wolf Season describes how old wounds from the Iraq War linger on in the lives of three women.

Priya Malhotra

In her latest novel Wolf Season, Helen Benedict tells the stories of three women in a small town in upstate New York coping with the trauma of war—not just the direct experience of violence and death, but also the collateral damage it inflicts on loved ones. Rin is a rape-scarred Iraq War veteran who has returned to her hometown of Huntsville. Naema is an Iraqi refugee who lost her husband during the conflict and now works in the town as a doctor. Beth is a military wife dealing with an abusive husband and a troubled child.

Continue reading Collateral Damage: A Review of Helen Benedict’s Wolf Season →

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Carol Prior, a key activist in a grassroots movement to stop the Carmichael mining project in Australia. Photo by Alex Bainbridge, Green Left Weekly.
Bowen, Australia
Interviews

Canary in the Coal Mine: A Conversation with First Nations Activist Carol Prior

The Indian corporation Adani is establishing one of the world’s largest coal mining operations in Australia, affecting Aboriginal lands as well as the Great Barrier Reef. The toll on the land and sea, says Juru elder and environmentalist Carol Prior, will be felt around the world—in the loss of a rare and beautiful ecosystem, and a rare and beautiful culture.

Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson

In Australia, a new mining megaproject threatens to devastate the Great Barrier Reef and the land of First Nations peoples. The planned Carmichael mine, set to be one of the world’s largest, will be located in the northeastern state of Queensland, within the vast Galilee Basin. It will be owned and operated by the Indian conglomerate Adani, which plans to export most of the coal to India by sea, via a soon-to-be-expanded port that sits on the Great Barrier Reef.

Continue reading Canary in the Coal Mine: A Conversation with First Nations Activist Carol Prior →

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News

Women’s March

Amid war and ruin in Syria, a Kurdish-led movement has established a society ruled by radical democracy—of, for, and by women.


Women and girls marching with flags
Women and girls march through the village of Derbesi to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.

A few years ago, I began hearing remarkable stories about a social movement in northern Syria. Not far from the wreckage of Aleppo, a society founded on principles of direct democracy and women’s rights has taken root in the predominantly Kurdish region known as Rojava. There, in defiance of the Islamic State’s brutal patriarchy, women are leading the way in political decision-making and fighting on the frontlines in their own battalions.

Continue reading Women’s March →

Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com

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Photo by Patrick Emerson, via Flickr
Jacksonville, Florida
Commentary

Failing Grades

I was torn about failing a fifth-grader. In a poor, predominantly black school, there were plenty of tests but few right answers.

Chris Schumerth

“Man, I don’t know any of this stuff!”

It was Lamar, one of my fifth-grade students. He and his classmates were taking a reading assessment. Within minutes, Lamar had given up.

“Mister Schuma, I ain’t doing this!”

“Lamar, you need to be quiet while your classmates are testing,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine if you give it a shot. No more talking.”

Continue reading Failing Grades →

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