The traumas visited upon Black bodies for the past 400 years have included physical violence and theft of spirituality, which is linked to today’s mental and spiritual wounds, passed down…
From the beginning, some Americans have been able to move more freely than others. By Ben Fountain, Medium — They were called patrollers or, variously, “paterollers,” “paddyrollers,” or “patterolls,” and they were meant to be part of the solution to Colonial America’s biggest problem, labor. Unlike Great Britain, which had a large, basically immobile peasant class that could be forced to work for subsistence wages, there weren’t enough cheap bodies…
Michael German, a former federal agent, spent years infiltrating white supremacist groups. Here’s what he has to say about what’s going on now. By Joe Sexton, ProPublica — Late in 2017, ProPublica began writing about a California white supremacist group called the Rise Above Movement. Its members had been involved in violent clashes at rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, and several cities in California. They were proud of their violent handiwork,…
Southern aristocrats wanted armed militias mainly to control their slaves. So they wanted language in the new nation’s constitution protecting that right. By Nicolaus Mills, Daily Beast — Mass shootings…
By Sikivu Hutchinson, The Humanist — On the bustling streets of Kensington in London last week, one of the Black women I asked to comment on the recent election of…
By Igor Derysh, Salon — The FBI ranked black nationalists and animal rights activists as bigger threats than white supremacists and terror groups like al-Qaida among their official counterterrorism priorities, according to leaked FBI documents obtained by The Young Turks. The documents show that the FBI’s official Consolidated Strategy Guide, which lists the bureau’s counterterrorism priorities, continues to focus on “black identity extremists,” well after the bureau assured Democrats in Congress that it would stop using…
By Derrick Johnson, NAACP President and CEO — As I ventured to the southern border near Laredo, Texas, I could not help but think about the tragic shootings in El…
The same anxiety that drives white supremacists has motivated Republicans to disenfranchise populations that don’t vote for them. By Luke Darby, The Guardian — Before he opened fire on an…
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout — In the immediate aftermath of the massacres in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, Donald Trump actually began to contemplate doing a tiny sliver of the right thing. In doing so, he ran straight into the teeth of the Second Amendment, without doubt, the most lethally misunderstood corner of the U.S. Constitution. On the Sunday after the attacks, Trump reached out to Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sen.…
By Dr. Keith Magee — America is experiencing the most perilous of times in recent history as the result of its president, Donald Trump. Even though Monday morning he stepped…
In theory, a president can offer comfort at times like these. But this one would prefer to hurl insults. By Richard Wolffe, The Guardian — In normal American mass murders – because such horrors have become so astonishingly normal – the president usually plays the role of some great but helpless comfort blanket. He may be unable to break the NRA’s cold, dead grip on the Republican party, but he…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — PART 1. We don’t have to be familiar with Frantz Fanon to concede that social conditions create, shape and even determine social consciousness. Nor do…