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Deante Campbell of Sanford joins student protesters during a demonstration June 4 against institutional racism at South Portland Police Station.

Teenagers lead the way in Black Lives Matter movement

By News & Current Affairs

Nationally and in Maine, young people of color are leading protests and asking their local leaders to address systemic racism. By Megan Gray, Press Herald — Mariam Beshir spent the days leading up to her graduation from Gorham High School organizing a Black Lives Matter march in her town. She wanted to celebrate. But she knew that Tamir Rice should have graduated from his own high school this year if…

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A man dressed as independence hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Port-au-Prince,

Haiti was the first nation to permanently ban slavery

By Reparations

Why this matters today. By Julia Gaffield, The Washington Post — Global protests in support of Black Lives Matter have systematically exposed the legacies of slavery and colonialism today. This has put many on the defensive. White people are quick to tout stories of abolition, emphasizing the path bravely forged by imperial powers like Britain and France. They diminish the realities and consequences of slavery and colonialism by demanding gratitude for ending…

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Folk dancers gather before performing at the 2018 Confederate Festival in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, Brazil. Each of their dresses is embroidered with the name of a state in the U.S. Confederacy.

They lost the Civil War and fled to Brazil. Their descendants refuse to take down the Confederate flag

By News & Current Affairs

Brazil’s confederados gather in Sao Paulo state each year to celebrate all things Dixie. As in the United States, calls are growing for a reassessment. By Terrence McCoy — To Marina Lee Colbachini, it was a family tradition. Each spring, she would join the throngs who descended on a nondescript city in southern Brazil, don a 19th-century hoop skirt and square dance to country music. The theme of the annual…

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A print of U.S. President Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Tallushatchee, 1813.

This Land Is Not Your Land

By Editors' Choice

The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans By David Treuer — In his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, in 1829, U.S. President Andrew Jackson—a slave-owning real estate speculator already famous for burning down Creek settlements and hounding the survivors of the Creek War of 1813–14—called for the “voluntary” migration of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Six months later, in the spring of 1830, he signed…

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Bill Clinton golfing with his wealthy friends on August 5, 2000, in Martha's Vineyard, MA.

The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Matt Bruenig, Jacobin — In light of the recent resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests, there has been renewed discussion of the racial wealth gap and how to close it (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Annie Lowrey). I have written on this topic many times in the past (I, II, III, IV). One thing I have tried to emphasize over the years, which I will do again here in a different way, is that due to…

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Long before President Jair Bolsonaro tested positive for COVID-19, the pandemic was ravaging the country’s poor neighborhoods and prisons.

How Jair Bolsonaro and the Coronavirus Put Brazil’s Systemic Racism on Display

By Reparations

By Anakwa Dwamena, The New Yorker — Several months before the coronavirus first arrived in Brazil, this spring, a series of man-made tragedies befell Maria Marques Martins dos Santos. On November 12th, dos Santos, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three, whose five-foot frame is crowned by curly brown hair, was at her home, in Favela do Amor, in São Paulo. Just after midnight, her fourteen-year-old son, Lucas, went out to buy soda and…

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