On The Biden Plantation

“Biden came across as a plantation owner telling the field hands that they have a good life and ought to be grateful.”

This columnist wrote those words in December 2020 before Joe Biden was inaugurated. His meeting with a group designated as Black leaders was as bad as one could expect, complete with dismissal, rudeness, and outright disrespect. It was vintage Biden, a man who was never the brightest and is now elderly and not fully in command of his faculties.

But the real Biden was always an unreconstructed racist, bragging about the 1992 Crime Bill which he said would, “Do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” Barack Obama chose him as a running mate precisely because of his credentials among conservative, race baiting democrats.

Continue reading

Patriot Front Fascist Leak Exposes Nationwide Racist Campaigns

The detailed inner workings and operations of neo-Nazi organization Patriot Front have come to light after a massive leak from their chat servers. The exposed communications show coordination with their leader Thomas Rousseau to deface murals and monuments to Black lives across the United States, and intimate struggles to bolster morale through group activities like hiking and camping.

This release includes more than 400 gigabytes of data published by Unicorn Riot. Ostensibly private, unedited videos and direct messages reveal a campaign to organize acts of racial hatred while indoctrinating teenagers into national socialism (Nazism). The information stands as a chilling reminder that fascist organizing thrives in secrecy and obscurity.

Continue reading

Judge Who Illegally Jailed Children Will Not Seek Reelection

Donna Scott Davenport, the juvenile court judge at the center of a controversy over the arrest and detention of children in Rutherford County, Tennessee, has announced that she will step down this year rather than run for reelection.

Earlier on Tuesday, ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio published a story about a move by some Tennessee lawmakers to remove Davenport from her post. About an hour after that story was published on ProPublica’s website, Davenport, in an email sent by the county’s spokesperson, announced that she will not be running for reelection this year. Instead, she plans to retire when her current eight-year term expires this summer.

Davenport, in announcing her retirement, said: “After prayerful thought and talking with my family, I have decided not to run for re-election after serving more than twenty-two years on the bench.

Continue reading

Critical Race Theory Is Dangerous

Glenn Youngkin, the new governor of Virginia, announced during his first day in office this month that he is banning discussion of critical race theory in his state. Many expect him to forbid discussion of the impact of viruses in causing the coronavirus next.

Rather than running away from it, the Democratic Party leadership must embrace critical race theory as the basis for educating our young people – and many of their parents – to overcome the divisions that are tearing this country apart and paving the way for a right-wing takeover. America’s culture warriors subscribe to the idea that ignorance is bliss, that is until Covid kills you or a member of your family. Their efforts to suppress history plays a similar role, enforcing ignorance, maintaining the status quo, and suppressing efforts to create a just society.

Continue reading

Freedom To Stay, Freedom To Move: An Interview With Harsha Walia

Harsha Walia has been involved in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist migrant justice movements for the past two decades. Her first book, Undoing Border Imperialism, offered a movement analysis of the foundational connections between migration, borders and imperialism, with insights into the grassroots organizing her work comes out of. Building on this, her latest work, Border and Rule offers a crucial resource for going beyond nation-based thinking about border regimes around the world and building an internationalist movement for their abolition.

In Border and Rule, Walia avoids comparisons of one border regime or another as “worse” or “better,” focusing on how borders are consistently a “method of capital” involved in seizing and holding territory and in the segmentation of the working class.

Continue reading

Building Communities For A Fascist-Free Future

On August 17, 2019, a coalition of antifascist and progressive groups in Portland, Oregon organized a rally to protest a Proud Boy event planned in the city. The rally had a carnivalesque atmosphere created by PopMob — an antifascist group of concerned Portlanders which seeks to “resist the alt-right with whimsy and creativity” — and brought on a diverse range of organizations, from labor and religious groups and civil rights groups like the NAACP to more militant organizations like Rose City Antifa.

During the protest, the latter, along with autonomous black bloc organizers, acted as a buffer between the crowds at the carnival and the hundreds of Proud Boys amassing at the other side of the waterfront park both groups were occupying.

Continue reading

On Contact: Islamophobia, Race And Global Politics

Islamophobia is not defined solely as anti-Muslim sentiment. It is not limited to hate speech and hate crimes, racial stereotypes, or discrimination against Muslim men and women. Islamophobia, in its most pernicious and deadly form, is embodied in the wars waged by the United States in the Muslim world, as well as the laws and internal security structures that turn Muslims in the United States into “the other.” These laws include the criminalization of migrants, allowing Americans to justify the violent and illegal treatment of the undocumented, and the wholesale surveillance of Muslim communities. It includes the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States on countries such as Iraq and Iran. It includes the numerous military bases and occupation forces in Muslim countries.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

Are Nonbank Mortgage Lenders Good For Minority Borrowers?

A loan officer at a mortgage company questions a Black loan applicant about household debts, but subsequently invites a less creditworthy white borrower to fill out an application with “no inquiry about credit standing or debts.” He then offers to walk the same white homebuyer through the loan application and preapproval process and follows up with personal emails. The Black borrower receives neither offers of extra help nor emails from the lender.

This unequal treatment played out in Seattle, Washington, and was part of a study in which testers with white and Black-sounding names and similar credit and asset profiles called a random sample of mortgage companies, including Movement Mortgage, seeking loans, according to a complaint filed in October by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based fair housing organization

Continue reading

New Anti-Protest Laws Cast A Long Shadow On First Amendment Rights

Tiffany Crutcher was worried.

Oklahoma lawmakers had passed a new measure stiffening penalties for protesters who block roadways and granting immunity to drivers who unintentionally hit them. The state NAACP, saying the law was passed in response to racial justice demonstrations and could chill the exercising of First Amendment rights, filed a federal lawsuit challenging portions of it. But the new law was only weeks from taking effect.

Crutcher, an advocate for police reform and racial justice, was moderating a virtual town hall about it, featuring panelists who brought the lawsuit. At the end, she asked a question that went directly to the stakes.

Under the new law, “is it safe for the citizens of Oklahoma to go and do a protest?”

The three men on the panel were silent.

Continue reading

The Pendulum Swing Of Black Liberation

In June of last year, I wrote a piece about the call-and-response between movements for Black liberation in the United States and elsewhere, focusing on the upheavals that happened in Sudan in late 2018, and of course the protests that erupted in Minnesota and spread across the country after the murder of George Floyd in May of last year. In this piece, I encouraged all of us to refuse the enclosures of hemisphere, market, nation and language, to embrace urgency and refuse to concede to the divisions presented by nation, market and geography.

This piece focused on the activation of struggles, and less so on the reality that each movement for liberation was met with a deepening repression and political conservatism.

Continue reading

Prisoners Sue Prison System Following Targeted Raid Against Black People

California prisoner, Talib Williams, is bringing a class action lawsuit on his behalf as well as other Black incarcerated people who were targeted by a July 20, 2020 raid at Soledad, California’s Correctional Training Facility (CTF).  The suit seeks a reprieve from the state-sponsored terror that is their norm. Injunctive and declaratory relief, among other remedies, are necessary to stop the violence, change CDCR policy, and compensate the prisoners for the degradation they have suffered.

The raid took place against the backdrop of nationwide Black-led uprisings that occurred after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.  It was part of a white supremacist backlash against the demands for justice for Black people across the country.

Continue reading

The US Experience: Racism And COVID-19 Mortality

Are you searching for a way to highlight the negative consequences of racism? Try this: Justin M. Feldman and Mary T. Basset, in a recently published study, found that if everyone living in the United States, aged 25 years or older, died of COVID-19 at the same rate as college-educated non-Hispanic white people did in 2020, 48 percent fewer people would have died, 71 percent fewer people of color would have died, and 89 percent fewer people of color aged 25-64 would have died.

The following infographic includes the actual number of lives that could have been saved.

Continue reading

How The Black Education Movement Took On The Racist Schools System

The fight to end racial disparities that continue to blight the British education system has been energised by the Black Lives Matter  movement, with a growing number of campaign groups joining the push to bring about real change in UK schools.

Grassroots organizations such as No More Exclusions (NME)  are aiming to end exclusions that disproportionately impact Black boys, while the Black Curriculum  is leading the fight to make Black history mandatory on the UK curriculum. And the fact it has already helped to do so in Wales suggests things may finally be changing.

But this is not a new fight. Decades before these groups were formed, the Black Education Movement (BEM) – a radical community collective of the 1960s and 1970s – took on the establishment and fought for equality in the schools system.

Continue reading

We Need A Peoples’ Movement And Not The World Economic Forum

Detroit, which remains a major industrial center in the sectors of automotive and other sources of production and services, is a focal point for the economic and social transformations of urban areas in the United States and internationally.

Since the 19th century, the city has been a location for various forms of manufacturing, mining and shipping.

Initially there was the strategic location linked to the Great Lakes and rivers which flow into them. The mining of copper during the mid-to-late 19th century which fueled migration eventually gave way to steam engine manufacturing for shipping and the timber trade.

By the early decades of the 20th century, the first assembly line within auto production was established by Henry Ford. The production of millions of automobiles within a matter of years, created the demand for jobs and the consequent suppression and division of labor.

Continue reading