By Jason Wilson (July 4, 2018) I have seen a lot of street confrontations in Portland and elsewhere now. The beat downs I saw last Saturday were among the worst I have seen anywhere. I don’t want to get into league tables of street violence but the street confrontations were more vicious and plentiful than what I saw in Charlottesville…
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By Mark Naison (June 24, 2018) Those of you who are shocked that Donald Trump successfully employed a politics of cruelty and rage to take him to the Presidency might want to revisit two events which prefigured his campaign: the excommunication of the Dixie Chicks from country music radio; 2. and the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s Vice…
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By Arun Gupta ( June 18, 2018) Immigrants are not your bludgeon to use against Democrats. Immigrants are not an object for your history lessons. Immigrants are not numbers in your game. Your argument that “it happened before” is utterly inhumane and shows complete contempt for solidarity for millions of immigrants in peril. What is happening now is unprecedented. Trump…
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By Octaviano Merecias-Cuevas (June 16, 2018) Have you ever had to? Abandon a lifetime at the eye-blink notice of a memory? As villages collapse and dreams become black fumes? As tanks roll-in while drones of anger machete their bloody ways into crops and farms? No laws can stop imploding sadness; burying babies in Syria. Dead AF floating towards the shores…
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By Laila Nur (June 1, 2018) The gun shots in my hood don’t make feel unsafe. The drunk yelling match at 2am between neighbors don’t make me feel unsafe. The random ass dogs running up and down the street don’t make me feel unsafe. The sex workers on the corner (who mean mug me on the daily lol) don’t make…
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By Alexander Reid Ross (May 21, 2018) It’s just a nightmare. I’m from Houston. It’s a place near and dear to my heart. When this sort of thing becomes normal, we all become targets. That this latest shooting was carried out by a gun obsessed white male is as unsurprising as his apparent fusion of authoritarian left-right politics. A hammer…
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By Mark Naison (April 30, 2018) My Black friends have always told me “Mark, if you were Black, saying the things you do, acting the way you do, you would have been dead a long time ago.” If you think they were exaggerating, read the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the death threats and insults the African…
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By Arun Gupta (April 24, 2018) “Pittsburgh is the New Portland” has become a cliche. The meaning is it’s a medium-sized environmentally friendly city hospitable to young people who are creative, have an unorthodox lifestyle, or politics, and the city is low cost and close to nature, at least compared to cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco….
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By S. (April 23, 2018) Dear White America, We have a communication problem. You are getting better at listening. In the past you’ve blamed us for not communicating to you in a manner that would facilitate you listening. We were too angry, too quiet, too loud, politically inconvenient, self-centered, stuck in victim mindset. Finally, thanks to cell phone footage, you…
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By Teka Lark (April 17, 2018) Boycott all Starbucks. Not just the one. The good white people need to learn too. Why I do the work that I do. I will not share the video of two Black men being removed by the Philadelphia police from Starbucks, because a white person was “afraid” (they aren’t afraid, they are racist) and…
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By Irami Osei-Frimpong (April 2, 2018) The number of times I hear some version of, “You can’t expect white people to ever be fair” is astounding. I hear this from white and black people across the education divide. Honestly, the people who are the most smug about this as a truism are white women with lots and lots of degrees….
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