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Race

Identity Politics and Elite Capture

The black feminist Combahee River Collective manifesto and E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie share the diagnosis that the wealthy and powerful will take every opportunity to hijack activist energies for their own ends.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

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Race

Race

Terror and Abolition

At a moment when the call to abolish police and prisons is louder than ever, we should also demand an end to counterterrorism, which functions largely to ensnare people of color.

Atiya Husain

Race

Why Has COVID-19 Not Led to More Humanitarian Releases?

Jalil Muntaqim, a Black Panther imprisoned since 1971, is one of thousands of elderly prisoners the United States has refused to free during the pandemic.

Dan Berger

Law & Justice, Race

The Pain Just Stays in Your Head

Police brutality is not isolated and exceptional. As Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture illustrates, it is built into the systemic nature of racial violence.

Gili Kliger

Race

The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.

Garrett Felber

Race

The Fire This Time

These protests are too widespread to go away. There will be no peace without justice on multiple fronts.

Scholars for Social Justice

Race

The Privilege of the Ally

Allies can be powerful aides to social justice movements—but it is their responsibility to make sure they don’t become a distraction from the cause.

Rigoberto González

Race

Black History in Three Acts

The story of how black people confront systems of racial capitalism and plot world liberation. A reading list from Robin D. G. Kelley.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Race

Decolonizing the University

In this interview, Lorgia García-Peña, who was denied tenure by Harvard in late 2019, discusses why ethnic studies has never been more urgent and the important role it can play in protest.

Lorgia García-Peña, Mordecai Lyon

Race

We Should Be Afraid, But Not of Protesters

The rage on display in Minneapolis is not only about police violence. It is also about the country’s utter disregard for the pain of black Americans.

Melvin Rogers

Race

The Minneapolis Uprising in Context

A proper understanding of urban rebellion depends on our ability to interpret it not as a wave of criminality, but as political violence.

Elizabeth Hinton

Race

COVID-19 and the Color Line

Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis. This is the result of racist policies which collapsed the social safety net while setting blacks in the path of danger.

Colin Gordon, Walter Johnson, Jason Q. Purnell, Jamala Rogers

Class & Inequality, Politics

Coronavirus and the Politics of Disposability

COVID-19 is having a disproportionate effect among vulnerable populations.

Shaun Ossei-Owusu

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THINKING IN A PANDEMIC

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