Dara Z. Strolovitch, "When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Oct 31, 2023

Dara Z. Strolovitch discusses crisis politics, its association with some problems but not others, and its implications for power and marginalization in the US. The guest explores the language of crisis used by political elites and activists, showing how racial justice activists transformed racism into a policy problem. They also analyze examples like the mortgage crisis and the pandemic to highlight the impact of crisis on inequality and advocacy.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Understanding Crisis and Its Impact on Marginalized Groups

02:44 • 24min

Perceptions of Crisis and Non-Crisis in Subprime Mortgage Lending

26:17 • 10min

Exploring the Characteristics of a 'Non Crisis'

36:25 • 2min

Framing the Foreclosure Crisis

38:16 • 8min

Understanding Different Categories of Crisis

45:50 • 6min

The Politics of Crisis and Non-Frames

52:16 • 9min

A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States.

From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do?

In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.

Dara Z. Strolovitch is Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association.

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