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Editors’ Choice

Black Panthers, Chicago, 1969

The Wages of Whiteness

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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…

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Theodore Roosevelt was one of many U.S. presidents who was racist.

Presidents have a long history of condescension, indifference and outright racism towards Black Americans

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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…

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In Wilkerson’s view, racism is only the visible manifestation of something deeper, a hidden system of social domination.

Isabel Wilkerson’s World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste

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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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Clockwise from top left: Police officers in Minneapolis; two Camden County, N.J., police vehicles; an officer at a Minneapolis gas station; and Sister Chabree Muhammad, with kids in Camden in July.

Police Reform: Here’s How America Should Rethink Safety

By Editors' Choice

America’s Policing System Is Broken. It’s Time to Radically Rethink Public Safety. By Josiah Bates and Karl Vick, TIME — In Minneapolis, the first days after George Floyd’s killing exist in memory as kind of a blur. Even so, the burning of the Third Precinct police station on May 28 was a signal event, and not only for residents of the south side, where Floyd was killed and so many buildings went…

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