
By Peter Birkenhead — How can it be that, in 2019, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was forced to give testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committeethat sounded like it could have…
By Peter Birkenhead — How can it be that, in 2019, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was forced to give testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committeethat sounded like it could have…
By Amy Goodman & Nermeen Shaikh — On the heels of Wednesday’s historic hearing on reparations, we speak with renowned writer Ta-Nehisi Coates on the lasting legacy of American slavery,…
By Katherine Franke — A bill calling for the federal government to “study and consider” how to provide reparations to African Americans for slavery has been introduced into every session of the US Congress for the last thirty years. The bill’s aim is “to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865.” Representative John Conyers, the primary sponsor of the…
By Cepeda, Roanoke Times — CHICAGO — In the spring of 1995, I sat in a stuffy classroom studying “Literary History of England, from Beowulf to 1800,” while overlooking Southern Illinois University’s iconic Pulliam Clock Tower. I was on the verge of boiling over. Somehow, the lone Hispanic (me and the lone black person in the tiny class were engaged in a shouting match over reparations for slavery. Rep. John…
By Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker — When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to treat reparations as a punch line is to misunderstand their purpose. He argues that reparations…
He wants to mandate employee ownership of big companies By Dylan Matthews, VOX — Bernie Sanders wants to help workers own a portion of the companies at which they are…
How the legacy of Jim Crow haunts Trump’s America By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, The New Republic — This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key figures in Reconstruction’s history, this copiously researched chronicle also doubles as a powerful and chilling window on to our own age of violent and resurgent white nationalism.
By Robert Greene II, The Nation — Gone was the optimism of 1963. It had been replaced by a sense of disillusionment, a sense of urgency that America was about to lose the last chance to have its soul.” This was how Jet magazine described the climax of the Poor People’s Campaign, which reached Washington, DC, in the tumultuous summer of 1968. For Jet and for many early civil-rights activists, the Poor People’s Campaign…
A new book explores how racist biases continue to maintain a foothold in research today By Ramin Skibba, Smithsonian — Scientists, including those who study race, like to see themselves…
Ana Lucia Araujo is a historian and professor at Howard University. Her latest book Reparations for Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History was published in…
By Inimai M. Chettiar, Priya Raghavan, Michael Waldman, Adureh Onyekwere — The American public has decisively concluded that our approach to criminal justice isn’t working. Mass incarceration is the civil rights…