How Kanye’s ignorant comments fortify the most pernicious lies of white supremacy. By Clint Smith — This past week, in an interview with TMZ, Kanye West claimed that slavery was a choice. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years … 400 years? That sounds like a choice,” he said. Much has already been written about West’s recent exploits on and off Twitter. In the past week, he has publicly embraced…
Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom. By Ta-Nehisi Coates — I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like folk wisdom, because when I think of that…
By A.T. McWilliams — While visiting the newly opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama — a hallowed and harrowing enshrinement bearing the names of over 4,000 black people lynched in the Jim Crow South — I was reminded of stories my grandparents told me as a child. Stories of my great-grandfather, once chased by Ku Klux Klan members on horseback before swimming to safety, preferring possible death by drowning…
By Mark Karlin, Truthout — By detailing the growth of the slave trade in the 17th century, Gerald Horne reveals how white supremacy, capitalism and the original sin of slavery in the Western Hemisphere became intertwined. Current politics are so chaotic, staggering and fast-paced that we rarely hear of how we arrived at this moment of the resurgence of white supremacy in historical context. However, Professor Gerald Horne, author of The…
How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people. By Ed Pilkington in Montgomery, Alabama — Vanessa Croft was driving home after work in Gadsden, Alabama, last month when…
A new museum and lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, constitute a watershed moment in the way America remembers its racist past. By Caleb Gayle — When it comes to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, there are two kinds of monuments in America. There are memorials that seek to honor this country’s fitful march toward civil rights. Then there are the statues of generals and politicians—as well as the…
There’s reckoning around our toxic culture of sexual abuse. But Black Americans are left waiting for remedies for white supremacy past and present. It’s time to #PayUp. By Bertha Lewis — #MeToo and #TimesUp are more than hashtags. They are movements to hold sexual harassers accountable and to deliver justice to victims and survivors of sexual abuse and harassment. While the call for justice for women who have been sexually…
Even in a high-tech era, fears about minority political agency are the most reliable way to destabilize the U.S. political system. By Vann R. Newkirk — There are a million and one threads to the chaos currently unspooling about the Trump administration and the 2016 election. One might be forgiven for giving up on trying to navigate the intricacies of congressional Russia inquiries, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ever-widening probe, news…
By Donald Yacovone — There it sat on a library cart with fifty other elementary, grammar, and high school history textbooks, its bright red spine reaching out through time and…
By Randy Blazak — I spent most of 1989 in Florida, hanging out with a group of skinheads who hated “The Cosby Show.” The white supremacists I embedded with for…
Some see the monument as “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world.” By Debra McKinney, Southern Poverty Law Center — From its north side, Stone Mountain is a formidable sight. Staggeringly steep, nearly five times as high as Niagara Falls, it rises from Georgia’s wooded landscape like a rogue wave. This anomalous, igneous dome east of Atlanta is the centerpiece of a state park that draws 4 million visitors a year. Forty stories above ground, front and center on the gunmetal-gray face of the stone, is the largest bas-relief carving on the planet, a Civil War memorial to Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. These leaders of the Southern rebellion against the United States sit astride their steeds, hats over their hearts, on a three-acre backdrop etched into the mountainside.
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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