“Whiteness thrives in darkness,” Coates writes. “So it was with the slave narrative. So it is with the cell phone.” By Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair — Last year Chicago poet Eve L. Ewing published 1919, a volume that channels her city’s Red Summer into blues. It is a magical work. The voices of house-keepers and stockyard hands are summoned. The thoughts of trains carrying black people north are conjured up. The doom of…
By Edwidge Danticat, NYREV — My neighbor died recently. I saw the ambulance arrive. The red and blue strobes bounced off every glass surface on both sides of our block. She was eighty years old, and ambulances had come for her before. There was that time she broke her arm in her backyard, and already accustomed to osteoporotic and arthritic pain, she treated herself until her movements led to other…
By Robert Reich – Since the first colonizers arrived in the United States to this very moment, wealthy elites have used the tools of theft, exclusion, and exploitation to expand their wealth and power at the detriment of Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and marginalized people of color. It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable. The profitability of racism sparks a vicious cycle called the Oppression Economy:…
By Tom Hall, LA Progressive – Where do we go from here? We’ve had a long hot summer of mostly peaceful demonstrations. This is a great contrast to the pre-election summer of 1968, in which Tricky Dick Nixon road a wave of violence to electoral victory. But this is also a summer of demonstrations against police violence, and that repeats both the pattern of 1968 and of decades back through…
By Hari Kunzru, NYREV — In 1981 members of a revolutionary group called the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink’s armored van at the Nanuet Mall in Rockland County, just outside New York City. In the robbery and a subsequent shootout with police, a guard and two police officers were killed. Assisting this Black Nationalist “expropriation” operation were four white Communists, members of a faction of the Weather Underground called…
The actor reflected the ownership of self that white America still has a hard time embracing, says film critic Elvis Mitchell By Elvis Mitchell, The Guardian — For African-Americans, always braced for news about our own being taken from us early, the unexpected impact of Chadwick Boseman’s death, from colon cancer – and the shoulder-to-the-grindstone dignity of his decision to work through his illness and keep it quiet – encapsulated…
A multi-dimension film that explores the Black Lives Matter movement from a Barbados/Caribbean perspective. Featuring: Eddy Grant Anthony “Gabby” Carter David Comissiong Robert “Bobby” Clarke Trevor Marshall Luci Hammans Alex Downes Peter “Adonijah” Alleyne Aida Gerbremariam Riddim Tribe Dance Collective Produced/Choreographed by: Aisha Comissiong
By Dimas Sanfiorenzo, okayplayer — Public Enemy has officially released “Fight the Power Remix 2020.” The group also announced a reunion with Def Jam. Full circle. Public Enemy has announced the title and release date for their new album, What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down. They also announced more exciting news: the album will be releasing on Def Jam Records, the label the iconic group started their career on. What…
President Woodrow Wilson told Black leaders, ‘Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.’ He was one in a long line of racist American presidents. By Stephen A. Jones and Eric Freedman — The fury over racial injustice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing has forced Americans to confront their history. That’s unfamiliar territory for most Americans, whose…
By comparing white supremacy in the U.S. to the caste system in India, her new book at once illuminates and collapses a complex history. By Sunil Khilnani, The New Yorker — As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “Stride Toward…
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