- How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, ed. Aracelis Girmay (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 2020), 19; and see Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674245495; O’Brien quoted in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 337. Emphasis in the original. Thompson cites this as the first occurrence of the term which he reintroduced into historical writing in his landmark article “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50, no. 1 (1971): 76–136. The concept gained even greater traction in economic sociology after political scientist James Scott analyzed the “notion of economic justice” and the “working definition of exploitation” that informed the “safety first” subsistence ethic of farmers in Southeast Asia, a then-contemporary counternarrative to the assumptions of profit-maximizing economic man. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Malcolm X, “What Does Mississippi Have to Do with Harlem?” 1964, http://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sources/ps_noi.html; “About” page, official website of US Congressman Bennie Thompson, https://benniethompson.house.gov/about.
- Amanda Klasing, “Mississippi Water Crisis a Failure Decades in the Making,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/02/mississippi-water-crisis-failure-decades-making; Ashton Pittman, “Gov. Reeves Signs $524-Million Tax Cut As Education, Infrastructure Funding Woes Remain,” Mississippi Free Press, April 6, 2022, https://www.mississippifreepress.org/22641/gov-reeves-signs-524-million-tax-cut-as-education-infrastructure-funding-woes-remain; Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves quoted in Kayode Crown, “Gov. Reeves Vetoes Jackson Water Bill, More Paving, Mask Requirement Ahead,” Jackson Free Press, June 30, 2020, at https://www.jacksonfree-press.com/news/2020/jun/30/gov-reeves-vetoes-jackson-water-bill-more-paving-m/.
- Immigrant Action for Justice and Equity, “El Gobierno Quiere Privatizar el Sistema de Agua Jackson; La Communidad Debe Decir Que No!,” Facebook, September 28, 2022, accessed October 8, 2022; Molly Minta, “‘What’s Next, the Air?’ Local Activists Push Back on Local Plans to Privatize the City Water System,” Mississippi Today, September 15, 2022, accessed October 8, 2022; Nick Judin, “Under the Surface, Part 3: A Water Crisis Amid a Legacy in Decline,” Mississippi Free Press, April 21, 2021, https://www.mississippifreepress.org/11498/under-the-surface-part-3-a-legacy-in-decline; accessed October 2, 2022; Michael Goldberg, “Mississippi Governor, Who Opposed Water System Repairs, Blames Jackson for Water Crisis,” PBS Newshour, September 27, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/mississippi-governor-who-opposed-water-system-repairs-blames-jackson-for-crisis#, accessed October 8, 2022; Seyma Bayram, “The Siemens Settlement, Explained,” Jackson Free Press, March 4, 2020, https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2020/mar/04/siemens-settlement-explained/, accessed October 2, 2022; having sued Siemens for $450 million in damages, the city settled with the company for $89.8 million in 2020.
- Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton: Preinceton University Press, 2017); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Lily Geismer, Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2022).
- Ashton Pittman, “Ex-Mississippi Welfare Leader Pleads Guilty to Federal, State Crimes in Exchange for Cooperation,” Mississippi Free Press, September 21, 2022, https://www.mississippifreepress.org/27551/ex-mississippi-welfare-leader-indicted-on-federal-conspiracy-fraud-charges; Jimmie E. Gates, “MDHS Confirms Most New Applicants Rejected for Welfare,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, April 20, 2017, https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2017/04/20/mdhs-confirms-most-new-applicants-rejected-welfare/100692926/. The quoted figures are for 2016; Melissa Alonso and Dianne Gallagher, “Former official pleads guilty in welfare fraud scheme where money was funneled to prominent Mississippians including Brett Favre,” CNN.com, September 23, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/us/mississippi-john-davis-welfare-fraud-guilty-plea/index.html; on Mississippi’s tax structure, which leaves income more unequal after taxes than before, see Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Mississippi: Who Pays?,” October 17, 2018, https://itep.org/whopays/mississippi/. The electoral rules established in the state’s 1890 constitution were explained with refreshing frankness by one of its framers, legendary white supremacist governor James K. Vardaman: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” Vardaman asserted. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the [African American citizen] from politics.” Vardaman quoted in Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 69. While many of the white supremacist mechanisms were invalidated under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one such rule remained in effect until amended in a statewide ballot measure in 2020. See Lawrence Goldstone, “America’s Relentless Suppression of Black Voters,” New Republic, October 24, 2018; Matt Ford, “Mississippi Quotes John Roberts to Defend Its Racist Election Law,” New Republic, July 19, 2019; Ian Millhiser, “How a Jim Crow Law Still Shapes Mississippi’s Elections, Vox, October 11, 2019 [updated Nov. 5, 2019], https://www.vox.com/2019/10/11/20903401/mississippi-jim-crow-law-rig-election-electoral-college-jim-hood-tate-reeves; Mississippi Center for Justice, “MS Legislature Proposes Constitutional Amendment to Repeal Discriminatory Election Scheme from 1890 Constitution,” June 30, 2021, https://mscenterforjustice.org/1605-2/.
- David Gilgoff, “New Campaign Asks ‘What Would Jesus Cut?,’” CNN Belief Blog, February 28, 2011, at https://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/28/new-budget-campaign-asks-what-would-jesus-cut/. The final package cut $38 billion.
- The capacity for the modern GOP to control all branches of the federal government without winning a majority of votes has been amply demonstrated in the twenty-first century. Most dramatically, between 2017 and 2021, more than 220 judges, including three Supreme Court justices, were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a Senate that a majority of voters didn’t choose. Laura Bronner and Nathaniel Rakitch, “Advantage GOP,” FiveThirtyEight, April 29, 2021, at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/. On the filibuster, see Emmet J. Bondurant, “The Senate Filibuster: The Politics of Obstruction,” Harvard Journal on Legislation 48 no. 2 (2011): 467–513; Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Filibuster,” Stanford Law Review 49, no. 2 (1997):181–254; Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joshua B. Grubbs, “‘I Don’t Want Everybody to Vote’: Christian Nationalism and Restricting Voter Access in the United States,” Sociological Forum 37, no. 1 (2022): 4–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12776; direct quotations from pp. 9–10. For an overview of minority rule at the federal level, see Adam Jentleson, “How to Stop the Minority-Rule Doom Loop,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/how-stop-minority-rule-doom-loop/618536/.
- Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Arun Gupta, “The Rant Heard Round the World,” The Public Eye, August 1, 2011, https://politicalresearch.org/2011/08/01/tea-party-new-populism; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 367.
- Clyde Adrian Woods and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, 1st paperback ed. (New York: Verso, 2017), 38–39.
- Red Cross worker quoted in Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27; Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA, 50th anniversary ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 57. Miller evidently cribbed the original 1928 recording “Eleven-Cent Cotton” from verses by Mrs. S. C. Ford of Frisco, Texas, that were reprinted in multiple newspapers across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas during the agricultural depression gripping the Southwest in the wake of World War I; it dropped to “Seven-Cent Cotton” before the 1932 version bottomed out at “Five-Cent Cotton.” The meat, in contrast, held steady at forty cents. Tony Russell, “‘Eleven Cent Cotton Forty Cent Meat’—Parts 1 and 2: Bob Ferguson [Bob Miller] Columbia 15297-D,” Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), online edition, Oxford Academic, https://doi-org.dartmouth.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/oso/9780190091187.003.0030; accessed October 2, 2022.
- Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America, 1st ed. (New York: One World, 2021).
- Martijn Konings, “Imagined Double Movements: Progressive Thought and the Specter of Neoliberal Populism,” Globalizations 9, no. 4 (August 2012): 617, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2012.699939. Konings is quoting from Walter Benjamin; Martjin Konings, “Neoliberalism Against Democracy?: Wendy Brown’s ‘In the Ruins of Neoliberalism’ and the Specter of Fascism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 22, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberalism-against-democracy-wendy-browns-in-the-ruins-of-neoliberalism-and-the-specter-of-fascism/; Nancy MacLean, “Southern Dominance in Borrowed Language: The Regional Origins of American Neoliberalism,” in New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, ed. Jane Lou Collins, Micaela Di Leonardo, and Brett Williams (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), 21–37.
- Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic and the Re-enchantment of Humanism: Suffering and Infrahumanity, Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Mark Matheson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 34–5; “lawful procuring and furthering the wealth and outward estates of ourselves and others” is the language that the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly uses to explain the Eighth Commandment, and which Smith memorized in his Presbyterian childhood. A. M. C. Waterman, “Moral Philosophy or Economic Analysis? The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith,” Review of Political Economy 27, no. 2 (April 2015): 223; Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 50–58; Stewart Davenport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jay R. Carlander and W. Elliot Brownlee, “Antebellum Southern Political Economists and the Problem of Slavery,” American Nineteenth Century History 7, no. 3 (September 2006): 389–416, https://doi.org/10.1080/14664650600956585; John Lindbeck, “Slavery’s Holy Profits: Religion and Capitalism in the Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018), https://search.proquest.com/docview/2063148500?pq-origsite=primo; Bradley W. Bateman and Ethan B. Kapstein, “Retrospectives: Between God and the Market: The Religious Roots of the American Economic Association,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 13, no. 4 (1999): 249–58, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.13.4.249; see Bethany E. Moreton, Perverse Incentives: Economics as Culture War (Near Futures, Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2023).
- Nell Irvin Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery, Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures 15 (Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, Baylor University Press, 1995); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!’: Ideology and Culture among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930–1935,” Science & Society 52, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 59–82. As Kelley explains, the title is slightly paraphrased from an interview with the legendary labor radical Hosea Hudson.
- Dread Scott, “Slave Rebellion Reenactment,” https://www.slave-revolt.com/; Grégoire Chamayou, The Ungovernable Society: A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism, trans. Andrew Brown (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021).
- Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); direct quotations from Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 6; Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)
- Schild Ledger Book, Blanton Museum, University of Texas, https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/spotlights/ledgerart/ledger-art.html; Melanie Taylor Benson, “Unsettling Accounts: The Violent Economies of the Ledger,” in Ledger Narratives: The Plains Indian Drawings of the Lansburgh Collection at Dartmouth College, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Hood Museum of Art (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 191.
