Black Achilles — The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether? By Tim Whitmarsh, Aeon — Few issues…
By Herb Boyd — “First you say you do/ Then you don’t. Then you say you will/Then you won’t/ You’re undecided now/ So what are you gonna do.” This indecision may work well in a popular song of yore, but it does little to end the 35 years former Black Panther and radio commentator Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent behind bars. On Thursday a Philadelphia Common Pleas judge ruled that Abu-Jamal who…
The region’s inequality and violence, in which the US has long played a role, is driving people to leave their homes By Julian Borger, The Guradian — Jakelin Caal Maquín,…
By Marisa Iati, The Washington Post — More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism. The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves…
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker — Cory Booker, one of a half-dozen Democrats routinely mentioned as a Presidential contender, is a man of singularly intense enthusiasms. He is a vegan…
How Staying Power shook British history. When it was published in 1984 Staying Power vividly captured the struggle for black British identity. Nearly 35 years on it still has lessons to teach. By Gary Younge, The Guardian — “The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison argued in a lecture in Portland, Oregon, in 1975: It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and…
Nixon came in part to avoid attending the funeral, but he also brought a check—later lost—for her children’s education, according to a family friend finally telling the story. By Eleanor…
By Greg Palast — It was a Republican, Martin Luther King Sr., who made John Kennedy president of the United States — for JFK’s saving Daddy King’s son, Martin Jr.,…
Without the startup ecosystems of the West, Nigerian entrepreneurs are building their nation, innovation by innovation. By Emily Feng, OZY — Any entrepreneur in Nigeria faces high operating costs brought…
You can attack the Palestinians in America uninterrupted, call to expel them and deny their existence. Just don’t dare say a bad word about Israel, the holy of holies. By…
People cherished many expectations for Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency. Many of these were not necessarily realistic and may have derived from a sense of relief in the departure of Jacob Zuma, rather than what may have been possible for Ramaphosa to do. By Raymond Suttner, Polity — In the early months Ramaphosa engendered considerable confidence as a result of his apparently methodical, systematic and measured way of handling his office. This…
The party was the natural political conduit for the protest movement. It must not betray that trust. By Gary Younge, The Guardian — With just a few thousand votes between the two candidates for governor, election night during the US midterms in Wisconsin could not have been more tense. The slender lead kept flipping between Republican and Democrat as various precincts reported their results. Then shortly before midnight a local news presenter suggested,…