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…
Fixing it requires the public airwaves to reflect the nation’s true diversity. By Walter Mosley — I was on this panel with five journalists a few months after Trump was…
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.
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…
By Kandia Johnson — As co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors is a modern-day revolutionary igniting change and turning messages into movements about law enforcement accountability and race in America. But beyond activist and co-founder…
Jerkins talks about her insightful new essay collection ‘This Will Be My Undoing.’ Hope Reese, Vice — When Morgan Jerkins entered Princeton University at age 19, she felt that she had “made…
Kim Bellware, Vice — Shock has emerged as the signature emotional response to the organized confusion of the Trump era. The president is at war with the same agents of federal law enforcement investigating his old campaign. Just months after an alt-right rally in Charlottesville ended in death, emboldened white supremacists are littering college campuses with propaganda. And an immigration system that was already broken has been thrown into even more chaos by a White House bent on vindictive, nativist policies.
An interview with Theopia Jackson, head of clinical psychology at Saybrook University. By Kali Holloway, AlterNet — While Donald Trump’s behavior has inspired an endless amount of speculation about his mental health (or mental illness, depending on who’s talking), there has been less discussion about the impact of his presidency on our collective mental states. Even as Trump has seemed to wage a sort of psychic war on black and brown communities,…
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose otherwise. By Kathy Roberts Forde and Bryan Bowman, University of Massachusetts Amherst — The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity. The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color. But how did we get this system…
By Prof. James Petras — The public denunciation by thousands of women and a few men that they had been victims of sexual abuse by their economic bosses raises fundamental…
By Brian T.Kagoro, Political analyst — I wanted to title this article ‘Cry My Beloved Country’. After all we recently had cholera outbreaks and our political parties are competing to demonstrate proximity to the West. It does not seem to matter under what terms and to what end Western support is secured. This flagrant courtship of the West defies logic of a liberation party and a social-democratic opposition formed by…
Speaking in Barcelona, South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues social values have been eroded by consumerist culture. Philosopher Byung-Chul Hal is one of the most recognized critics of the problems caused by the hyper-consumerist and neoliberal society after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In books such as Fatigue Society, Psychopolitics and The Expulsion of Difference (published in Spain by Herder), the South Korean-born German author takes aim at this society and its effects on the individual.…