By Chris Crass (July 28, 2016) White working class anti-racist leadership is rising all around us and points us towards the work that must be done to unite white communities away from the death culture of racism and into the life-affirming, liberatory mass movement for racial justice and Black Lives Matter that is all around us. And to help…
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By Adam Hefty (July 20, 2016) – Incredibly privileged gay white man comfortably speaking for all the oppressed? Just no. – Acting as though political change in the US progresses in some gradual, arithmetic way from local races to national races? Just no. (How could anyone think this after just watching the Bernie Sanders campaign? Yes, I’m aware that…
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By Mark Naison (July 20, 2016) I have many friends, most of them younger than me, who are terrified by the divisions in the country, by the violent acts that periodically add to the tension, and by an election which brings out a level of fear and anger they have never seen before. Unfortunately, this is not new to me….
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(July 19, 2016) Phoenix Calida: So um, I get all the jokes about Melania plagiarizing. But can I please just point out that the speech in question was about the moral and ethical superiority of capitalism and boot strapping? And both white republicans AND white liberals couldn’t stop jizzing themselves over the greatness of the bootstrap message? There’s an underlying…
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By Joseph Orosco (July 13, 2016) Last week, I wrote that tackling the problem of police violence was going to be difficult without altering legal standards around the use of deadly force. I used the example of Missouri’s laws which shielded Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Some people contacted me about the piece and…
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By. S. Brian Willson (July 13, 2016) As a criminologist I find it instructive to place police brutality in its historical perspective (it is not an aberration). For example: (1) The 1968 “Walker Report: Rights in Conflict” examined the civil disturbances (“rioting” at the DNC in Chicago, Aug, 22-29). It took more than 20,000 pages of statements from 3,437 eyewitnesses…
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By Chris Crass (July 12, 2016) Rather then the standard in media of asking Black people about their forgiveness of the police who killed their babies, or asking if they are anti-police, and the standard of nearly every Black person in the country needing to hold a press conference expressing that they aren’t calling for violence against police, but rather equal…
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By Mark Naison (July 11, 2016) When approaching controversial issues, people bring personal experience as well as ideology to the table. My vantage point on the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Alton Sterling is very much shaped by my experience as a coach and youth program director. When I was coaching and running a neighborhood basketball program,…
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By Joseph Orosco (July 7, 2016) The criminal justice system that is. In the aftermath of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, there are calls for widespread police reform, ranging from mandatory body cameras, better training to the establishment of civilian oversight committees and the election of pro-reform officials. It’s not clear that these reforms that focus on…
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