Since January, white male journalists have spearheaded a public lamenting of the dearth of American public intellectuals, by which they mean, academics who write accessibly and make an attempt to stay “in touch” with the masses who exist outside the Ivory Tower.
During his 2004 Senate run and again during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama stood firm in his opposition to reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. “I have said in the past – and I’ll repeat again – that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed,” he said in 2008 right before his historic election.
Monday morning I woke up — not with Georgia — but with Selma on my mind. Selma bears witness to the bloody and murderous struggle to end discrimination in voting on the basis of race.
Growing up on the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, Renee Zschokke was surrounded by racism, but didn’t even know it. Her crime-ridden neighborhood, enveloped in violence she fell victim to for a period of time, sparked a desire in her to pursue a career in criminal justice, in order to “lock up the bad guys.”
On March 5, 2014, the government of Venezuela and millions of Venezuelan citizens, joined by many thousands around the world, including heads of state, commemorated the first anniversary of the death of Hugo Chávez Frías.
Often, particularly in urban schools and districts, someone asks: “Where are the black male teachers?”
From the kangaroo courts and lynching laws of yesterday to the still lingering crack vs. powder-cocaine disparity today, miscarriages of justice have been an ever-present feature of the U.S. criminal punishment system.
In the video, Joey Lee Pyatt Jr. is standing shirtless in a dingy kitchen, a blue bandana tied around his neck.
Chokwe Lumumba maintained a civil rights commitment that was rooted in the moment when his mother showed her 8-year-old son the Jet magazine photograph of a beaten Emmett Till in his open casket. The commitment was nurtured on the streets of Detroit, where Lumumba and his mother collected money to support the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.
Marijuana’s legal, but people of color are still disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated for drug use.
Eighteen American multinationals — companies such as Nike, Microsoft and Apple — have used tax havens abroad to avoid what Citizens for Tax Justice estimates as $92 billion in federal taxes.
The rightful marking of Black History Month directs us toward the constant critical retrieval and rereading of history and serious reflection on the meaning and models of leadership and struggle, especially in these trying times.
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The Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW, IBW21) is committed to enhancing the capacity of Black communities in the U.S. and globally to achieve cultural, social, economic and political equality and an enhanced quality of life for all marginalized people. – Learn more here
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