Skip to main content
Cosplayers portraying characters from the 2018 US superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character, Black Panther, pose in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi on February 14, 2018

“Black Panther”: Rip Off the Racial Mask

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Nicholas Powers, Truthout — Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. Was this the Promised Land? Black people partied on the escalator. I was going to my seat and asked if the movie was good. “Yooo,” they cheered; a teen mimed a silent explosion from his head. We laughed and slapped hands. Black Panther is more than a film. For two hours, it lets us leave the imagery of people of…

Read More
U.S. Census

Who Counts?

By Commentaries/Opinions

How the Trump administration’s scheme to rig the census threatens American democracy By Eric H. Holder Jr., New Republic — In his first year in office, Donald Trump and his administration have launched a daunting number of direct and open attacks on long-respected American rights and freedoms—threatening immigrants, the media, health care, transgender rights in the military, and much else. But there have been other, indirect and behind-the-scenes attacks, too, which may be no less damaging to…

Read More
United Auto Workers and Nissan employees in August 2017 after a failed unionization bid. High profile battles have put a spotlight on the links between economic and racial justice.

How Black Lives Matter Breathed New Life Into Unions

By News & Current Affairs

As Black Lives Matter and other social justice campaigns focus more on economic inequality, unions see an opportunity. By Mike Elk, The Guardian — After decades of decline unions have found a new champion in efforts to organize workers: the Black Lives Matter movement. Unions have suffered as manufacturing has moved south away from their old strongholds in the north of the US. Membership rates were 10.7% in 2016, down from 20.1% in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time the shift from manufacturing to service industry jobs has hurt them too.

Read More
The British Treasury’s tweet shows slavery is still misunderstood

The British Treasury’s tweet shows slavery is still misunderstood

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

The modern equivalent of £17bn was paid out to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. Some people believe we should be proud. By David Olusoga — It is hard to imagine why somebody at the Treasury thought that the subject of slavery was fertile territory from which they might harvest their weekly “surprising #FridayFact”. Just after lunchtime on 9 February the department’s Twitter page presented its third of a million followers with its latest offering. “Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes,” it trumpeted.

Read More
For People of Color, Banks Are Shutting the Door to Homeownership

For People of Color, Banks Are Shutting the Door to Homeownership

By News & Current Affairs

By Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez — Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts. This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to a mountain of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records analyzed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Read More
caribbean-residents-see-climate-change-severe-threat-us-dont-heres

Caribbean residents see climate change as a severe threat but most in US don’t — here’s why

By News & Current Affairs

People in the U.S. and the Caribbean share vulnerability to climate change-related disasters, but only in the Caribbean is the public truly worried. Why? By Elizabeth J. Zechmeister and Claire Q. Evans, The Conversation — During the 2017 Atlantic basin hurricane season, six major storms – all of which were Category 3 or higher – produced devastating human, material and financial devastation across the southern United States and the Caribbean.

Read More

February 15, 2018 — International Decade for People of African Descent Hill Briefing 

By News & Current Affairs

February 15, 2018 — International Decade for People of African Descent Hill Briefing. Capitol Hill Briefing on H. Res 713. Congressman Hank Johnson (GA-04) hosts a briefing on H. Res 713 to designate January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2024, as the “International Decade for People of African Descent.” To engage governments & societies across the globe join together with people of African descent to promote respect,…

Read More
“Halting at Noon,” a wood engraving showing a slave drive through Virginia in the early nineteenth century, 1864

Slavery and the American University

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Alex Carp — According to the surviving records, the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island (the estate, in a stroke of historical irony, was named Whitehall). The scholarship’s first recipient went on to found Dartmouth, and a later grantee…

Read More
President Jacob Zuma

South Africa’s Ruling Party Decides to Remove Zuma as President

By News & Current Affairs

By Alexander Winning and James Macharia, (Reuters) — South Africa’s ruling party decided on Tuesday to sack Jacob Zuma as head of state, two sources said, after marathon talks over the fate of a leader whose scandal-plagued years in power darkened and divided Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation’. The decision by the African National Congress’s (ANC) national executive followed 13 hours of tense deliberations and one, short face-to-face exchange between…

Read More