The Chauvin conviction was momentous, and could be a turning point, but police reform ultimately depends on building a popular movement for reform in education, health, housing, as well as ending police racism and violence.
Category: Racism
The Only Treatment is Freedom: Mumia Abu-Jamal and COVID
The inextricable link between incarceration and standards of democracy in a country led the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to observe that, “The degree of civilization in society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
Mumia Time or Sweeney Time
Dave Roediger wrote in 2000, “[T]he extent to which Abu-Jamal knows that he needs to identify with the labor movement, and that some in the labor movement know that they need to support him, signals what the working class movement is becoming and can be.”
Why Does Racism Survive?
Why does this anachronistic ideology survive, and even at times such as these, seemingly flourish? Obviously, the institutions of slavery no longer nourish racism. What then is its wavelike revival rooted in?
Authoritarianism and Resistance in India
Samantha Agarwal discusses the foundations of BJP rule in India and prospects for resistance. (From our Summer 2020 issue.)
review
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste
The Occlusion of Political Economy
Wilkerson’s adroit storytelling jumps off the page, but the glaring omission in her book is political economy.
Fighting the Far Right in the Biden Era: Discussion on Sunday, Jan. 24
New Politics is co-sponsoring an online discussion of how the Left can organize to fight the Far Right under the incoming Biden administration, scheduled for Sunday, January 24th at 2:00 pm ET/ 11 am PT.
Remembering Martin Luther King’s Last, Most Radical Book
King links race and class as the twin pillars of the capitalist exploitation that is the generator of poverty, economic inequality, spiritual disenchantment, and racial animosity in America and across the world.
Race, Crisis, and Resistance in the United States
An Interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discusses the significance of the struggle against racism and police violence.
Desperado in the White House: Coup Fails, Trump Faces Impeachment
We have to call this a failed coup because the intent was to overturn the election of Joseph Biden by forcing vice-president Mike Pence and the Congress to declare Trump the president. It was an attempt to overthrow the incoming elected government by force.
Racism and Capitalism
Because capitalism and racism are intertwined, and because of the role that racism plays in dividing the working class, if we want to fight against capitalism and class inequality, anti-racism has to be at the center of our activity.
Movement Alders Flip to Pass Austerity Budget
In the most contentious Chicago budget vote in a generation, four “progressive” alderpeople buckled to Lightfoot’s pressure and allowed an antiworker austerity city budget to pass for 2021.
The radical right after Trump
An atomized, racially fragmented, demoralized working class will always be prone to Trumpism. If Biden and the Democrats stick to the policies they have implemented and backed ever since the late 1970s, disorganized workers will either further shift to Trumpism or (as is more likely with Blacks) simply abstain.
QAnon and On and On
Let me venture a prediction about next week that also applies to the months and years to follow: At no point will Donald J. Trump order the arrest of an elitist network of cannibalistic pedophile Satanists. Not one!
Fighting for teachers unions that speak back to power, defend students and social justice
School reopenings have become a point of political conflict on a national level, as parent, student, and teachers’ rights to have healthy, safe, equitable schools have been subordinated to the bipartisan consensus to put the economy and profit over human need.
Presidential Candidates and Society Debate Protest and Violence
Protest, sometimes with conflict between anti-racist and rightwing groups, continues in various U.S. cities—Portland, Louisville, and Rochester—over 100 days since the killing of George Floyd. America has not seen such street fighting since the 1960s.
Anti-Racism and Class Struggle
Making anti-racism front and center within a strategy of class-based resistance corresponds to the realities of the societies we live in and to the particular features of the present period.
Covid-19 and Resistance in Brazil: Life-Making, Memory, and Challenges in Seeding an Alternative Future
Capitalism is a death-making system. The pandemic reveals a chain of solidarity among essential life-making workers all across the world.
Comrades and allies: An interview with Donna Murch
Sherry Wolf interviews Donna Murch, activist and author of “Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland,” about the Black Lives Matter uprising and questions of organization, solidarity, and strategy.
Why We Campaign to ‘Save the Middle Class’ and Shouldn’t
The centering of “saving the middle class” in presidential politics not only left open the possibility of direction of anger and misunderstanding towards the racialized poor, but encouraged it.
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