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, 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.

"[A] fascinating and timely new book. . . .Strolovitch treats the term 'crisis' as a 'keyword': a type of word that has its meaning shaped by social and political processes as well as a word that’s political meaning imbues power. That power includes when it’s used as well as when it’s not." - 3Streams

"Strolovitch builds a strong case for how privileged communities use and usurp true crises in marginalized communities to gain resourced and power. This is a must read for students of economics, public policy, race relations, political science, and sociology." - Choice

"In her book, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America, Strolovitch examines how politicians construct and exploit the idea that an event or problem is a “crisis” to justify using state power and resources to address it. As [Strolovitch] explains, they are most likely to declare and treat something as a crisis when persistent issues that mostly impact marginalized communities begin to affect more privileged and dominant groups. The book was this year’s co-winner of the American Political Science Association’s Race, Ethnicity, and Politics’  Best Book Award." - Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies