By Eugene Mason, PBS — The United States owes African-Americans reparations for slavery, a recent report by a United Nations-affiliated group said. The UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said that compensation is necessary to combat the disadvantages caused by 245 years of legally allowing the sale of people based on the color of their skin. The U.N. group warned that the U.S. has not confronted its legacy of “racial terrorism.”…
From Ethiopia to Tanzania and South Africa to Ghana, African nations are embracing this ledger technology to weed out graft. By Kizito Makoye, OZY — On his first day in…
By Felice León, The Root — It’s no secret that Jesus Christ, known in Christian circles as the Son of God, is often depicted as a white man. But, how…
By Marisa Iati, The Washington Post — More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism. The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves…
By Nick Turse, Vice — The deadly ambush in Niger last October that left four U.S. serviceman dead prompted months of hand-wringing inside the Pentagon. But that botched operation, which drew national attention to U.S. counterterror operations throughout Africa should not have shocked military leadership, the former commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in Africa told VICE News. “These weren’t the first casualties, either. We had them in Somalia and…
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker — Cory Booker, one of a half-dozen Democrats routinely mentioned as a Presidential contender, is a man of singularly intense enthusiasms. He is a vegan…
What a Danish slave trade castle in Accra revealed about Ghana’s history and my family. By Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, Hampshire College — As a Ghanaian archaeologist, I have been conducting research at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the castle is a former seventeenth century trading post, colonial Danish and British seat of government, and Office of the President of the Republic of Ghana. Today,…
Solomon Plaatje, an early ANC leader, came to America in 1921 to expose the growing number of race laws back home. By Matthew Blackman, OZY — A short, well-dressed 44-year-old…
How Staying Power shook British history. When it was published in 1984 Staying Power vividly captured the struggle for black British identity. Nearly 35 years on it still has lessons to teach. By Gary Younge, The Guardian — “The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison argued in a lecture in Portland, Oregon, in 1975: It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and…
By Ihron Rensburg, University World News — What will be Global Africa’s unique contribution to the creation of a new, different, inclusive, caring, decolonised future as it, Global Africa, rises, carefully…
Revulsion is building towards the smokescreens of hypocrisy, racism, and nationalism barely masking capitalism’s ongoing failure to provide the jobs and incomes people need. By Richard Wolff, Common Dreams — In the wake of W.E.B. DuBois ’s 150th birthday, his works offer a lens through which to assess US capitalism’s relationship to racism today. He famously wrote: “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction,” while adding…