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Race

Image: Ronald Reagan, with Nancy Reagan, signing the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1988

The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Vesla M. Weaver — Two new books, including National Book Award nominee ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman, Jr.; Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John F. Pfaff

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Slave ship diagram, first printed as a broadside in England in 1789

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

By Reparations

What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage as the driving and animating force of this abject horror. By Gerald Horne — The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth…

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President Lyndon Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the White House, March 18, 1966

From “War on Crime” to War on the Black Community

By Commentaries/Opinions

The Enduring Impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission Elizabeth Hinton, Boston Review — In his televised speech following five days of civil unrest in Detroit during the summer of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson announced the creation of the Kerner Commission to evaluate the uprisings there and in other cities, and to prescribe policies to suppress future disorder. The American public also demanded insight into why cities burned and what drove…

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Cotton weighing during harvest time in the Mississippi Delta

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice — By Walter Johnson

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Walter Johnson — In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016) It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting. I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal…

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Photo of Keisha Blaine by Chioke I’Anson for Virginia Commonwealth University

The Scholar Helping America Grapple with Its Ugly History

By Commentaries/Opinions

Kim Bellware, Vice — Shock has emerged as the signature emotional response to the organized confusion of the Trump era. The president is at war with the same agents of federal law enforcement investigating his old campaign. Just months after an alt-right rally in Charlottesville ended in death, emboldened white supremacists are littering college campuses with propaganda. And an immigration system that was already broken has been thrown into even more chaos by a White House bent on vindictive, nativist policies.

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