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Can My Children Be Friends with White People?

Ekow N. Yankah New York Times
As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.

Year One: When Black Women Lead

Steven W. Thrasher The New York Review of Books
Black women have long known that America’s destiny is inseparable from how it treats them and the nation ignores this truth at its peril.

Tidbits - November 9, 2017 - Reader Comments: Election Day Victories - Lessons Going Forward; Painters Union Supports Nicaraguan Workers; Why Soviet Union Collapsed?; Lots of Announcements; and more....

Portside
Reader Comments: It's a New Beginning - Election Day Victories; AFL-CIO Delegates Support #BlackLivesMatter; Lessons for Democrats; Painters Union Support Nicaraguan Workers and their Families; Readers Debate: Why Soviet Union Collapsed; Workers' Tips; Lots of Announcements: Los Angeles, Pasadena, Culver City, New York, and Cuba; and more....

books

Police are the Problem, Not the Solution

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
The author argues convincingly and in graphic detail that the problem with police in civil society is not just the lack of adequate training, police diversity, increased militarization or even police methods such as the routine brutalization of many people of color, but the dramatic and unprecedented expansion in the last four decades of the too-accepted social role of police. The problem, the sociologist-author insists, is policing itself.

Eight-Year-Old Football Players Kneel During National Anthem Amid St. Louis Protests

Des Bieler Washington Post
Amid protesting in St. Louis over the acquittal of a white police officer accused of murdering a black man after a car chase, a youth football team decided to take a knee during a pregame rendition of the national anthem. The team's coach said that the decision was made by the eight-year-olds following "a good teaching moment" about what was happening in the nearby city, and why.

Police Unions, Police Officers, and Police Abolition

Rosa Squillacote Portside
Abolition of the carceral state is a fundamental political goal for the Left today: specifically, abolishing the carceral state’s logic and institutions. . Abolition is both a goal and a discourse: it informs the strategies we adopt, as well as the framework we use to critique the carceral state and describe alternatives.

Eyes on the Prize 2017: Not Your Grandma's Civil Rights Strategy - Whose Streets? (Then and Now)

Jon Else Tom Dispatch
Jon Else, was the series producer and cinematographer for the classic TV documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. His new book, whose new book, True South, is a moving look at the civil rights movement through one man's life, frames our present grim moment in the context of that remarkable history. It's a past worth remembering as the protest movement of the twenty-first century finds its way in a grim world.
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