How Can We Right Past Wrongs?

Last Wednesday, March 10, the Associated Press (AP) published an article [https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-massachusetts-c54f6419bf59017ab28956d35981a55e] following the recent push for reparations in the town of Amherst. The article draws heavily on a recent interview with former Sociology Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass) Edwin Driver, the first professor of color [http://scua.library.umass.edu/youmass/doku.php?id=d:driver-edwin-d] hired by the univers

Symposium: The Racial Politics Underneath the Welfare Question

In my last column, I discussed [https://amherststudent.com/article/symposium-frozen-texas-and-the-welfare-question] the rhetoric surrounding the Texas freeze, the relief going to Texas and Republican arguments about relief and redistributive government programs in general. I showed how the moral arguments of personal responsibility and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps are self-defeating and lead to stagnation. I also showed how the empirical arguments against these relief policies are predi