NY Times Opinion | America Runs on ‘Dirty Work’

August 17, 2021

In a discomfiting NY Times essay adapted from his forthcoming book, Eyal Press (a Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media)  asks Americans to reckon with our “dirty work.” Those of us with privilege, he argues, have shifted our most troubling labor onto the most marginalized people, but still bear responsibility for the violence committed in our names, even as we try to eschew it. “Like so much else in a society that has grown more and more unequal, the burden of dirtying one’s hands — and the benefit of having a clean conscience — are increasingly functions of privilege…What we owe dirty workers is the willingness to see them as our agents and to grapple with our own complicity.” Press recently discussed his new book with Rose Aguilar on Media Roundtable.