By Joseph Orosco (June 27, 2020) Dear Commissioners Augerot, Malone, and Jaramillo: This June, you issued a statement in response to the historic protests across the globe reacting to the killing of George Floyd. You recognized that communities were gathering together to “give voice to the centuries of inequality, exploitation and abuse suffered by Black and African American people in…
Read more
By Teka Lark (June 15, 2020) CW: sexual assault I heard someone say, “We need the police, what if you get home invaded.” Chances of that happening are almost nonexistent for boring people who worry about being home invaded on Facebook. That’s a crime you have to plan out, it’s not a dash-and-grab kind of situation, and it typically involves…
Read more
By Mark Naison (June 15, 2020) Right now, your Black sisters and brothers are depending on you to make this country a safer place for them to live, work and raise their children. That can only happen if white people hold other white people accountable for behavior which makes Black people feel isolated, stressed out, and in danger. There is…
Read more
By Mark Naison (June 9, 2020) If we want to have a society where life expectancy and infant mortality are not at the bottom of advanced nations, and where 50% of the wealth doesn’t accrue to the top 1 percent, we have to gradually shift public funds from prisons and policing to education, health care, and affordable housing. As we…
Read more
By Teka Lark (June 8, 2020) During WW2, over 127,000 Japanese Americans were put into internment camps. The Japanese American community lost $400 million, which would be $5 billion in today’s money. I don’t give a damn if Japanese Americans got a pathetic amount of reparations (if they were still alive), you never recover from someone uprooting your family and…
Read more
(Photo by Heather Mount, @heathermount) By S. (June 2, 2020) A number of thoughtful friends have reached out to ask me how I’m doing in the wake of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Christian Cooper and the riots that followed. Short answer: I’m optimistic. Longer answer: 20 years ago Amadou Diallo was murdered by the police and the conversations I…
Read more
By Mark Naison (May 30, 2020) As an historian, I am am hardly surprised at the uprisings taking place in cities throughout the country. The murder of George Floyd pushed people filled with rage at their position in Trump’s America over the edge. It is not just that repeated murders of unarmed Black men and women, by police or self…
Read more
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Aoril 23, 2020) The face of US fascism/white nationalism, a right wing populist element to it, but also the major Republican party donors, Koch, DeVoss, Coors, etc. The Republican Party has become a US-style Fascist organization with its storm troopers and radical ideology, the price worth paying apparently for the billionaire donors, themselves libertarian and neoliberal (privatize…
Read more
By Mark Naison (April 20, 2020) As protests against state wide shutdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19 continue to erupt in many states, people are missing one key point. So long as people continue to die in large numbers from COVID-19 and our health care system is stressed well beyond capacity, a large percentage of the population will continue…
Read more
By Teka Lark (April 13, 2020) The Surgeon General, Dr. Adams, stated, to paraphrase, that we people of color (Black people and Latinos) need to lay off the alcohol and healthfully eat so that we won’t die of the COVID-19. People were quite (understandably) outraged, but I also found something similar in the Chicago Defender that also outraged me: “If…
Read more
By Julio Covarrubias (April 2, 2020) United States of Sinvergüenzas “Intellectuals still argue whether Amerika is a fascist country. This concern is typical of the Amerikan left’s flight from reality. … This is actually a manifestation of the authoritarian process seeping into its own psyche.” —George Jackson Watching DNC running dogs pile-on on Bernie’s National Press Secretary Brie Joy’s…
Read more