Tag: Black America

A Black Woman On The Supreme Court Won’t Change Capitalist Oppression

This week, Justice Stephen Breyer announced that he is retiring from the Supreme Court and President Biden promptly reiterated his promise to fill the seat—for the first time ever—with a Black woman. Breyer, who has served 27 years on the Court, is one of the three remaining “liberal” justices. In that sense, this resignation isn’t a major earthquake: the makeup of the court will remain the same. Still, the announcement comes at an opportune time for the Biden administration.

A few months ago, Breyer himself said he was not ready to retire. The timing of his recent announcement to retire before the Court’s session ends in June and ahead of the November midterm elections indicates that he is concerned about the future political makeup of the court.

Legal Cannabis Opens A Pandora’s Box Of Equity Issues

Gunn leads a congregation at Clearwater Missionary Baptist Church in Ocklawaha. A retired teacher, he served as president of the Florida chapter of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFAA) from 2009, when he co-founded the organization, until 2018.

And this 61-year-old has been the face of growers grappling with the Sunshine State for its first and only license to cultivate and sell medical marijuana. Until recently the $1 billion Florida market has been in the clutches of a half-dozen companies, essentially an oligopoly.

But Gunn’s father was part of the billion-dollar settlements in Pigford v. Glickman and In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation (the so-called Pigford II), the landmark class-action suits against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in which it was established that systemic harm had been done to Black growers through federal loan discrimination.

Black America Criminal Justice and Prisons Medical Marijuana Racial Equity

An Interview with Kamau Franklin Of Community Movement Builders

Well simply put I think his policies, as predicted by any serious left analysis, have continued the terrible predicament of Black life in america. Biden by his own admission was a moderate and was not destined to do anything particularly helpful for the larger collective Black community. His inability to direct his own party to pass his signature legislation, Build Back Better, is a clear indication of how weak he is politically. His refusal to challenge to do anything on voting rights, to extend the housing moratorium to expand healthcare, to cancel student loans, and lastly to have a coherent national policy on fighting the COVID pandemic shows that his loyalties were always to just keep capitalist markets chugging along without the bombast of a Trump-like figure. That is what both the white political and economic elite wanted and the Black political elite wanted.

Africa Black America Joe Biden Socialism

Three Men Convicted Of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery Sentenced To Life

The three white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced Friday to life in prison, with a judge denying any chance of parole for the father and son who armed themselves and initiated the deadly pursuit of the Black man in February 2020.

The life sentences for Travis McMichael, who fatally shot Arbery, and his father, Gregory McMichael, do not carry the possibility of parole. Their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan will be eligible, however, Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley said. Bryan must serve at least 30 years in prison before he is eligible for parole.

Ahmaud Arbery Black America Criminal Justice and Prisons Georgia

Documents Prove Tennessee County Disproportionately Jails Black Children

Tennessee’s Rutherford County, which has been widely criticized for its juvenile justice system, has been jailing Black children at a disproportionately high rate, according to newly obtained data. And, in a departure from national trends, the county’s racial disparity is getting worse, not better.

In an earlier story, ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio chronicled a case in Rutherford County in which 11 Black children were arrested for a crime that does not exist. Four of the children were booked into the county’s juvenile jail.

Since publishing that story, the two news organizations have received reports from the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth. This data shows that while the county was locking up so many kids — often illegally — it was also jailing an exceptionally high percentage of Black children.

Black America Criminal Justice and Prisons Racism Tennessee

The Need For A Feminist Lens

The Black Experience in the Americas has always been, by circumstance, design and by purpose, inextricably tied to the land and to forms of Resistance expressed through different peoples in different territories throughout the Americas. Climate change affects communities and regions differently, even within the same country, depending on their cultural, economic, environmental, political and social context. But climate change also affects people differently within these same communities and regions depending on their race and genders, both at an individual and collective level.

For Black communities, an underspoken issue that is usually left out of organizing spaces related to climate change is migration.

Black America climate crisis Feminism Migration

How The US Government Segregated America

For many years, I worked in Boston public housing with teams of residents, community organizations, public housing staff and other professors on reducing and removing the many asthma triggers that caused the highest rates of asthma and asthma attacks in the city. Living and working in the heart of the city neighborhoods, I was keenly aware of the apartheid nature of public and residential housing (black Roxbury, white South Boston, white gentrification overtaking Boston’s mixed-income interracial neighborhoods, and white suburbs)

I had been familiar with the mid-20th century pattern of “white flight” from urban neighborhoods to suburbs, abetted by venal realtors scaring white residents to sell low while selling high to black homebuyers, and “redlining”–realtors and banks refusing to show or offer mortgages to qualified African American homebuyers in white neighborhoods.

Black America Housing Red Lining Segregation

Iran Threatens Sanctions Against US Over Treatment Of Black Americans

The Iranian government vowed today to impose sanctions on the United States over racial and policing issues.

Secretary-General of Iran’s Human Rights Office Kazem Gharibabadi said the Islamic Republic will publish a list of American entities and individuals involved in human rights abuses. They will then be subject to sanctions from Iran, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Gharibabadi did not offer specifics on what the sanctions will entail, but said the move relates to policing issues in the United States, particularly in regard to Black Americans.

“Human rights experts confirmed that police brutality in the US against people of color especially, African-Americans, should be considered systemic racism,” he said.

Black America Iran Sanctions Systemic Racism

On Contact: The Black Agenda

Glen Ford, who died in the summer of 2021, was one of the country’s most insightful political commentators and radical journalists. He appeared several times on this show. He spoke for the marginalized and excoriated the elites. Glen was the co-publisher of the radical Black Commentator. He co-founded Black Agenda Report with Bruce Dixon and Margaret Kimberley in 2006. Glen repeatedly called out the Black political elites, exposing for example New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s close ties with right-wing organizations such as the Manhattan Institute and the Bradley Foundation and Booker’s advocacy of neoliberalism, austerity programs, school privatization, and other initiatives that are at the forefront of the war on the poor, especially poor Blacks.

Black America Black Liberation Black misleadership class Glen Ford

Rittenhouse And Verdict Mania

Every high-profile trial which demonstrates the connections between systemic racism and law enforcement rivets 40 million Black men, women, and children to television, newspapers, and social media. One would think that jury verdicts change the living conditions of Black people in this country. The recent trial and not guilty verdict in the case of Wisconsin shooter Kyle Rittenhouse is but one example of this phenomenon.

Black America Criminal Justice and Prisons Racism Rittenhouse

Race As A Factor In Human Rights Abuses

This section of our Human Rights in the U.S. 2021 Report will examine key areas of inequality and the ongoing human rights violations that characterize Black life in the U.S. that constitute violations of basic human rights. Because we are addressing human rights and not merely civil rights violations, this oppression is not an internal matter to be addressed only by the governments, processes or people of the United States, but rather a crime against humanity that is properly addressed and adjudicated upon a world stage.

Black America Human Rights Racism White Supremacy

Trials Highlight Racism

Two high-profile murder trials are taking place simultaneously in the U.S. – one in the Deep South and the other in the Midwest. Despite the obvious distance in miles, both trials have two main political themes in common: The first is the prevalence of white supremacy and the second is the Black Lives Matter struggle. These two important societal issues loom large over the individuals on trial.

The first trial involves three white men – two who had openly voiced Klan-like opinions – who are accused of fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old son of African immigrants, on Feb. 23, 2020. Arbery was jogging in a majority white suburb of Brunswick, Georgia, when he was chased down by a pickup truck driven by Greg McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael.

Black America Criminal Justice and Prisons Legal System Racism

Judge Halts Sale Of Apartment Complex Where Black Graves Were Buried

Bethesda, MD – A community coalition has provided “overwhelming evidence” that a portion of a suburban Washington apartment complex was used as a burial ground for freed Black slaves and their descendants and “many bodies likely still remain on the property,” a Maryland judge ruled Monday in a case by the group to thwart the sale of the property.

The Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission’s pending $50 million sale of Westwood Tower in Bethesda to a local investment firm, Charger Ventures, drew intense public opposition over the summer and led to the lawsuit filed by the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition. The group had furnished historical accounts indicating the gravesite — known as Moses Cemetery — was paved over with asphalt for a parking lot when the apartments went up in the late 1960s.

Black America Maryland Mass Graves Racial Justice

Howard University Sit-in: A Struggle For Democracy At An HBCU

On late Tuesday, Oct. 12, Howard University students began staging a sit-in demonstration at the Blackburn building in front of the historic Yard. Students brought sleeping bags and food and began demonstrating and making demands that the university protect their health on campus.

In the past month, as students returned to the school after more than a year under COVID conditions, a Twitter video went viral showing a puddle of water filling the floor of a kitchen in a dorm room. Later reports confirmed pooling water in students’ closets and bedrooms as well.

The university responded to the apparent lack of maintenance and upkeep, saying, “There have been rooms in select residence halls that were affected by mold growth.”

Black America HBCUs Higher Education Student Activism

The Many Crimes Of Colin Powell

“But we already had two firsts. Colin Powell was one of them, and Condoleezza Rice, his successor as secretary of state. How did that redound to the benefit of black people for the United States to have a black — put a black face on imperialism, on aggressive war, on violations of international law? How does that make black people look better in the world? Is that the kind of burden that black people want to carry around?” Glen Ford

The late Colin Powell certainly had a storied career. It wound through various Republican presidential administrations from Ronald Reagan, to George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush. He served as National Security Adviser, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State. He said this about his life and work, ““All I want to do is judge myself as a successful soldier who served his best.”

Black America Colin Powell Foreign Policy War Criminal

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