Portside

As the Pentagon prepares to lift a ban on transgender people serving in the military, Lily Zheng calls for a more radical "transgender rights" movement outside of assimilationist rhetoric and policies.

Thousands of people have reached out over the past week to connect with SURJ and find ways to move into action against police violence and for racial justice. Below is a statement from SURJ’s leadership in light of the 136 murders of Black people by police this year and the shooting in Dallas last night.

Do police in the US keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do history and global context explain recent police killings of young Black people in the US? What alternative ways might there be to keep communities safe? These are questions explored in Truthout's first print collection, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.

On both sides of the English Channel, politics should now be directed at understanding how, in a democracy, the political establishment could have done so little to address the concerns of so many citizens. Every EU government must now regard improving ordinary citizens’ wellbeing as its primary goal. More neoliberal ideology won’t help.

A combination of better jobs and pensions will remove one political obstacle to a green transition—and it’s the right thing to do.

Fifty years on geophysicists have progressed from believing continents never moved to thinking that every movement may leave a lasting memory on our Earth. By discovering the secrets of our past, we may be able to predict the motion of our plate tectonic future.

It shows the limits of party politics—and the necessity of social movements to challenge those limits.

“There’s clearly a different Constitution being employed in poor neighborhoods where most of the people are black and brown than in our white neighborhoods, On an absolute regular basis police are stopping and searching people of color in this city with no legal justification to do it.”

For years, the medical community has treated autism as if it was a “white person’s” disease. Research and therapy have been geared toward affluent, white people and families, creating serious racial and ethnic disparities in all areas of autism. The autism community has made tremendous strides in educating the general public about neurodiversity and the ways different brains work. It needs to make a similar effort to embrace the racial diversity of people with autism.

Reading the majority opinion in Garner is a bracing experience. Justice White’s extended discussion of the common law standard of police use of force makes clear on many levels that he did not merely want to replace the common law rule: he wanted to bury it.That police could use any amount of force, including deadly force, to “seize” a fleeing felon—the common law rule which at issue in Garner—was not only constitutionally infirm, it made little sense as a policy matter.