Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial C...

Up next

Michael R. Griffiths, "The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized wr ...  Show more

Oli Mould, "Postcapitalist cities: Towards a common urban future" (Manchester UP, 2026)

What is the future for cities? In Postcapitalist Cities: Towards a common urban future (Manchester University Press, 2026) Oli Mould, a Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, looks at the past, present and future of the city to con ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Racism, Class, and the Opioid Crisis
The Dig

Featuring Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg on how American capitalism and its illusions of whiteness both created the opioid crisis and shaped the response to it. We are discussing their book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in Ameri ...  Show more

Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)
New Books in Sociology

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new ca ...  Show more

CLASSIC: Who created the opioid epidemic?
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

In the U.S. doctors often prescribe opioids for pain management, and it's no secret that these substances are a big business for pharmaceutical companies -- and, increasingly, it's no secret that exposure to these legal pills are turning patients into unwilling addicts. So how ex ...  Show more

Matthew D. Lassiter, "The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs" (Princeton UP, 2023)
New Books in Public Policy

Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as ...  Show more