In rushing to the defense of accused rapist and head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn, well-known conservative commentator Ben Stein has stooped to blatant classist stereotypes. His headline on the American Spectator website, “Presumed Innocent, Anyone?,” implies that he’s just asking for a fair trial before judgment – a reasonable point. But look at why he thinks Strauss-Kahn is probably innocent:
Economists can’t be rapists? Hotel maids are lunatics?
Thursday, May 19th, 2011Restorative Circles: Justice without Classism
Monday, December 13th, 2010We know the justice system is biased by inequality. The best justice money can buy. And the locations where this justice system is carried out – courtrooms, classrooms, living rooms, workplaces – are filled with people labeled with roles of unequal status: the judge and the accused, the cop and the criminal, the parent and the child, the perpetrator and the victim, the boss and the worker, the teacher and the student. These roles and locations carry with them social and cultural capital that privileges one over another and support dynamics of “power over” and “power under.”
