Skip to main content
Category

Commentaries/Opinions

Zora Neale Hurston

Witnesses for the Future

By Commentaries/Opinions

Zora Neale Hurston’s drive to tell the story of the slave trade’s last survivor By Emily Bernard, The New Republic — “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. “You shall see how a slave was made a man.” These words herald the moment when Douglass masters his master, the sadistic overseer and “negro-breaker,”…

Read More

Divest From the Business of Incarceration

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Ron Jacobs, Counter Punch — The Trumpist policy of kidnapping children at the border has begun to shine a light on the nature of imprisonment in the United States for people who didn’t pay attention before. Over 60% of all detained immigrants are in private prisons. CoreCivic is one of the biggest private prison corporations in the United States. CoreCivic used to be called Corrections Corporation of America but…

Read More

Trump’s War on Children is an act of State Terrorism

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Henry Giroux, Counter Punch — State terrorism comes in many forms, but one of its most cruel and revolting expressions is when it is aimed at children. Separating children from their parents is indeed a form of terrorism and it points not only to a society that has lost its moral compass, but has also descended into such darkness that it demands both the loudest forms of moral outrage…

Read More

The Republican Party Moves From Family Values to White Nationalism

By Commentaries/Opinions

The migrant crisis signals an end to one era for the GOP—and the terrifying start of a new one. By Alex Wagner, The Atlantic — Sitting in the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, surrounded by a largely white, male group of Republican lawmakers and administration officials, President Trump attempted to defuse a bomb of his own making. “We have compassion, we want to keep families together,” he said as he signed an…

Read More

‘This is huge’: black liberationist speaks out after her 40 years in prison

By Commentaries/Opinions

Exclusive: Debbie Sims Africa, the first freed member of a radical Philadelphia group many say were unjustly imprisoned, talks about reuniting with her son and defends the Move members still locked up: ‘We are peaceful people’. By Ed Pilkington, The Guardian — The first member of a group of black radicals known as the Move Nine who have been incarcerated, they insist unjustly, for almost 40 years for killing a…

Read More
‘When navigating the white space, blacks … tend to be biased in favor of the well-off white people, those they guess likely to be free of prejudice toward black people.’ Photograph: Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures

This is what it feels like to be black in white spaces

By Commentaries/Opinions

Black people experience discrimination every day – it’s knowledge inaccessible to white people and, when confronted with it, most are incredulous. By Elijah Anderson, The Guardian — Almost every black person in America has experienced the sting of disrespect on the basis of being black. A large but undetermined number of black people feel acutely disrespected in their everyday lives, discrimination they see as both subtle and explicit. Black folk…

Read More
‘There’s another important public space where blackness has been policed: the voting booth.’ Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA

Voting while black: the racial injustice that harms our democracy

By Commentaries/Opinions

The routine suppression of black voters is far-reaching and has devastating consequences. We cannot be silent about it. By Carol Anderson, The Guardian — The recent spate of whites calling 911 on African Americans for barbecuing while black, waiting in Starbucks while black, sleeping at Yale while black ad nauseum has led to a much-needed discussion about the policing of public spaces. Yet, there’s another important public space where blackness has been policed and we have…

Read More
Maj. Gen. Roger L. Cloutier Jr., the chief of staff for U.S. Africa Command, at the Pentagon on May 10. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

The future is African — and the United States is not prepared

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Salih Booker and Ari Rickman, The Washington Post — Salih Booker is the executive director of the Center for International Policy. Ari Rickman is a research fellow at the Center. Beginning in 2035, the number of young people reaching working age in Africa will exceed that of the rest of the world combined, and will continue every year for the rest of the century. By 2050, one in every…

Read More