
Calculating the Damage from a Century of Drug Prohibition. By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch — We live in a time of change, when people are questioning old assumptions and seeking…
Calculating the Damage from a Century of Drug Prohibition. By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch — We live in a time of change, when people are questioning old assumptions and seeking…
Rather than making concessions to bigots, politicians must confront them. It’s the only way to end the violence. By Gary Younge, The Guardian — On 19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring another 684, in the deadliest act of domestic US terrorism to date. A white supremacist, among other things, he was radicalised by what he…
By examining scientific papers, correspondence between naturalists, and the records of slaving companies, historians are now seeing new connections between science and slavery and piecing together just how deeply intertwined they were. By Sam Kean, Science Magazine — At the dawn of the 1700s, European science seemed poised to conquer all of nature. Isaac Newton had recently published his monumental theory of gravity. Telescopes were opening up the heavens to…
Is a united Africa, freed from the legacy of colonialism, possible? The Pan-African movement has been advocated by many different voices, underpinned by a belief in the common destiny of the peoples of Africa. By Hakim Adi, History Today — It is more than 60 years since the All-African Peoples Conference convened in Accra, Ghana in 1958. It was a notable event in the history of Pan-Africanism. Organised by two…
Gentrification is geographically limited in cities, but a new study shows where it has become a crisis, particularly for low-income black households. By Brentin Mock, CityLab — Ron Daniels, president of the Baltimore-based civil-rights network Institute of the Black World 21st Century, assembled a group of some of the foremost African-American social-justice advocates, thinkers, and influencers to Newark this weekend for an emergency summit on gentrification. The emergency is that too many…
By Wyatt Massey, Frederick News Post — The Rev. Dr. Ernest Campbell said no, James Forman could not speak at his church service the next day. Campbell was the senior pastor at Riverside Church, a predominantly white church on the west side of Manhattan. Forman, a black civil rights leader, wanted to read something to the congregation at the next day’s service on May 4, 1969, according to a history…
Too often whites at discussions on race decide for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn. And it is their space. All spaces are. By Ijeoma Oluo, The Guardian — I was leaving a corporate office building after a full day of leading workshops on how to talk about race thoughtfully and deliberately. The audience for each session had been similar to the dozens…
More than 20,000 African American residents were displaced from low-income neighborhoods from 2000 to 2013, researchers say. By Katherine Shaver, Washington Post — About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The District also saw the most African American…
Blaming the Internet alone for racist mass shootings is a naive delusion. By Brendan O’Connor, The Nation — At the juncture of blood-strewn history and a crisis-ridden future, 49 Muslims in New Zealand lie dead, executed at prayer by a white supremacist. A man has been charged with murder while others are being questioned over their involvement and the names of the victims have not yet been made public. The…
By Eric Levitz, New York Magazine — In recent days, as Democrats debated the definition of “reparations,”Joe Biden rationalized his opposition to integration, and socialist congresswomen started demanding the rebirth of a nation, inquiring minds wanted to know: What would Ta-Nehisi say? Throughout the Obama years, Ta-Nehisi Coates provided politics-watchers with a regular source of historically grounded, bracingly well-written punditry and reporting. But since 2016, the writer’s ambitions have led him off of…
By Todd S Burroughs — Gary Byrd turned 70 on Thursday, March 14, 2019. I thought this was as good an excuse as any to pull this out of my…
MSNBC VIDEO — Reparations for slavery is becoming a hot button issue in 2020. Joy Reid is joined by Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee on H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study reparations, and long-time participant in the legitimate movement for reparations, Rev. Mark Thompson.