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Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo and China’s President Xi Jinping at the 2018 summit in Beijing.

Ties between African countries and China are complex. Understanding this matters

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Yu-Shan Wu, Chris Alden and Cobus van Staden, The Conversation — The complex relationship between Africa and China has become even more complicated this year. Initially, 2018 was set to reaffirm the bond through the latest Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit held in Beijing in September. The summit delivered its usual pageant of African leaders, side deals, and the announcement of a USD$60 billion financing package. The year also saw the recurrence of misgivings about…

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ida-b-wells

Ida B. Wells And The Women Pushing Back Today

By Commentaries/Opinions, Video/Audio

Audio by WNYC Studios — Journalist and activist Ida B. Wells is in some ways a forgotten figure, overlooked even in black civil rights history. But her reporting on lynchings across the South was unwavering in its mission: calling America out on racial injustice. And, why black women are no longer willing to play the role of “Magical Negro” in U.S. politics. The United States of Anxiety recently recorded a live…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reacts to a passerby in New York City on June 27, 2018.

A Blue Wave Next Month Could Be the Start of a Progressive Sea Change

By News & Current Affairs

By Katrina Vanden Heuvel — If Democrats flip the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus will have the leaders, agenda, and institutional muscle to drive the debate. “Only in the darkness can you see the stars,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us. Now, even in the bleak night of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, there are stars that offer hope. If Democrats take back the House…

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James Forten

This Black Activist Was One of the Richest Men in Early America

By Editors' Choice

A Black sailmaker was helping to lead the anti-slavery movement long before it was popular in America. By Sean Braswell, OZY — In the spring of 1842, several thousand Philadelphians poured into the streets for one of the largest funerals in the city’s history. It was a remarkable sight: An interracial procession that included everyone from poor Black laborers to wealthy White merchants to sea captains and shippers. On that…

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Technology

Digital colonialism on the African continent

By Editors' Choice

JOHANNESBURG – Earlier colonialists came by boats to “the new world” and expanded their empires by building railroads, farms and infrastructure. Today’s colonialists are digital; they implement communication infrastructures such as social media in order to harvest data and turn it into money. This threatens the upcoming democracies in Africa, as they experience explosions of fake news and misinformation with tribal violence and democratic unrest as dire consequences.

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A Trump rally in 2016.

A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump

By News & Current Affairs

Hint: It has to do with race. By Zack Beauchamp, Vox — One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to…

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Alice Huffman’s consulting firm is on track to make $800,000 from its work but she denies there is a conflict of interest.

NAACP leader opposes rent control bid while taking real estate money

By News & Current Affairs

California president under fire for opposing pro-tenant measure yet working as a paid consultant for real-estate backed campaign. By Sam Levin, The Guardian — The California leader of a major US civil rights group is facing backlash for fighting a rent control measure while working as a paid consultant for an opposition campaign funded by real estate companies. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in California is opposing…

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Denmark Vesey House at 56 Bull Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

Slavery and Memory in Charleston, South Carolina

By Reparations

By Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, AAIHS — The familiar refrain after the Emmanuel AME massacre on June 17, 2015, was that Dylann Roof, the murderer, was not from “here.” But as Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts’ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy aptly demonstrates, Roof’s understanding of history and memory in Charleston led him to that church; and his understanding was not alien to the sometimes violently, oft-contested memory of slavery in the…

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