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Philosophy & Religion, Race

Why Black Marxism, Why Now?

The threat of fascism has grown before our eyes. Black Marxism helps us to fight it with greater clarity, with a more expansive conception of the task before us, and with ever more questions.

Robin D. G. Kelley

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Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

Race

American Racism in the Time of Plagues

The United States has a long history of blaming Asian immigrants for outbreaks of disease. Every time, democracy and public health suffer.

Andrew Lanham

Politics, Race

Missing Zinn

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

Politics, Race

The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy

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

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