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Commentaries/Opinions

Movie Black Panther

The Tragedy of Erik Killmonger

By Commentaries/Opinions

The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony. Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

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February 23, 2018
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Latin American Presidents. From left to right: Evo Morales (Bolivia), José Mujica (Uruguay), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Cristina Fernandez (Argentina), Rafael Correa (Ecuador) in 2014

The Strategic Challenge for the Latin American Left

By Commentaries/Opinions

Mass-Media has become the main opposition to the progressive governments of the region. By Rafael Correa, Telesur — After the long and sad neoliberal night of the 1990s – which broke entire nations like Ecuador – and since Hugo Chávez won the Presidency of the Republic of Venezuela at the end of 1998, the rightist governments of the continent began to be overthrown like houses of cards, bringing Popular governments and aligned with ‘Socialism of Good Living’ across our America.

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February 23, 2018
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Black Women Are The Embodiment Of Black Glory

Black Women Are The Embodiment Of Black Glory

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Tyece Wilkins — In the basement of East City Bookshop on a brisk D.C. night, Morgan Jerkins filled the room with her signature blend of intellect and style. It was the fifth night of her 17-stop tour for This Will Be My Undoing, a book I’d stumbled upon only a few days prior and instantly fallen head over heels in love with. My copy was already beginning to wear at…

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February 22, 2018
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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…

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February 21, 2018
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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…

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February 20, 2018
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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.

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February 20, 2018
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“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…

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February 13, 2018
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Photo of Keisha Blaine by Chioke I’Anson for Virginia Commonwealth University

The Scholar Helping America Grapple with Its Ugly History

By Commentaries/Opinions

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.

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February 12, 2018
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