Skip to main content
Category

Commentaries/Opinions

Theopia R. Jackson, PHD

How Trump Trauma Is Resurrecting the Jim Crow Era

By Commentaries/Opinions

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,…

Read More
Convicts leased to harvest timber in Florida around 1915

Exploiting Black Labor After The Abolition Of Slavery

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

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…

Read More
Robert Mugabe

Struggle on my beloved country, Zimbabwe

By Commentaries/Opinions

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…

Read More
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in Barcelona

“In Orwell’s ‘1984’ society knew it was being dominated. Not today”

By Commentaries/Opinions

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.…

Read More

Black People Need More Representation And Fewer ‘Representatives’

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Janelle Harris — Surya Bonaly was art to watch. My mama, home on a rare half-day from work, was flipping through our local TV channels and, seeing a new black ice skater, hurried to record her on a VHS tape she reserved exclusively for classic movies and occasional Oprah Winfrey shows. After I got in from school, she slid it into the VCR. “Watch this little black girl,” she…

Read More
How much has really improved for black people in the U.S. since 1968

Black Americans mostly left behind by progress since Dr. King’s death

By Commentaries/Opinions

How much has really improved for black people in the U.S. since 1968? By Sharon Austin — On Apr. 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while assisting striking sanitation workers. That was almost 50 years ago. Back then, the wholesale racial integration required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act was just beginning to chip away at discrimination in education, jobs and public facilities. Black voters had only obtained legal protections two years earlier, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act was about to become law. African-Americans were only beginning to move into neighborhoods, colleges and careers once reserved for whites only.

Read More
It’s happened ever since I began teaching as a graduate student in 1991. Most semesters in which I have taught a course related to U.S. history, the complaint appears at least once on my students’ course evaluations: “too much time on race.”

Black history is U.S. history — but some of my students don’t want to hear it

By Commentaries/Opinions

History class should be the last place where we stop talking about race. By Donald Earl Collins — It’s happened ever since I began teaching as a graduate student in 1991. Most semesters in which I have taught a course related to U.S. history, the complaint appears at least once on my students’ course evaluations: “too much time on race.”Whether at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington…

Read More
“Man in Forest Green,” 2016 Credit Derrick Adams/Tilton Gallery, New York

Who First Showed Us That Black Lives Matter?

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Chris Lebron — As a black philosopher, I am constantly navigating a path through the traditions and categories that define my profession. Most often, that navigation takes place between the canonical Western philosophy stretching back to Ancient Greece and the more recent intellectual output and contributions of previously excluded groups, including women, L.G.B.T people and African-American thinkers. This last tradition — the history of black thought — is a…

Read More