A Political and Literary Forum
A transcript of our panel discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement.
Elizabeth Hinton, Robin D. G. Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Brandon M. Terry, Cornel West
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
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
COVID-19 is having a disproportionate effect among vulnerable populations.
Shaun Ossei-Owusu
The United States has a long history of blaming Asian immigrants for outbreaks of disease. Every time, democracy and public health suffer.
Andrew Lanham
On the tenth anniversary of radical historian Howard Zinn’s death, Cornel West opens up about their friendship and what Zinn would have made of the decade—including whether he would have voted for Bernie.
Cornel West, Mordecai Lyon
Seeking to discredit those who wish to explain the persistence of racism, critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue—distorting the full case that can be made for it.
David Waldstreicher
Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
Walter Johnson
History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage.
Britt Rusert
Long before the Civil War, black abolitionists shared the consensus that violence would be necessary to end slavery. Unlike their white peers, their arguments were about when and how to use political violence, not if.
Randal Maurice Jelks
Robin D. G. Kelley talks with musician Vijay Iyer about systems of oppression, the responsibility of artists, and how jazz sells proximity to blackness to white people.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Vijay Iyer
More than simple racism or discrimination, the destructive premise at the core of the American settler narrative is that freedom is built upon violent elimination.
Nikhil Pal Singh
The real estate market is so structured by race that black families will never come out ahead.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
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