Portside

How a new generation of tech-savvy activists made violence against African Americans into global headline news

Ajamu Dillahunt, founding member of Black Workers for Justice, a grassroots organization focused on empowering African-American workers to become leaders in the Black Freedom and labor movements. The text below is from an oral history interview conducted on May 8, 2014. This interview was supported by the Southern Oral History Program and is a part of a larger oral history project focused on documenting the recent political upsurge in North Carolina and across the South.

The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, comments on the final report on the World Health Organization’s handling of the Ebola crisis, a devastating critique of the WHO and its member states, which “fatally let down the people of West Africa.” It criticizes the report for not addressing lack of accountability and chronic underinvestment in the WHO, the need to create resilient health systems, and the need for universal health coverage.

Mondoweiss co-editors Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss talk with Palestinian human rights activist Omar Barghouti, on the 10th anniversary of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement. Barghouti is co-founder of the movement, which, he says, has played a critical role in changing the discourse on the question of Palestine after more than two decades of a “fraudulent peace process” that undermined Palestinian rights and served as a fig leaf for Israeli expansion.

On July 2, the states attorneys general in Louisiana and four other Gulf Coast states celebrated an $18.7 billion settlement with BP over claims from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But, according to the Public Interest Research Group, at least $13.2 billion in the settlement is not defined as a penalty, meaning BP could potentially get billions in tax breaks, even on payments it made to restore natural resources damaged by the spill.

The recent riots at the for-profit Kingman Prison in Arizona are focusing renewed attention on that state legislature’s long, cozy relationship with the private prison industry. Prisoner unrest the July 4th weekend left 15 wounded and forced the transfer of 1,000 inmates to other facilities. The same facility, run by Management Training Corporation, suffered a major riot in 2010. The repeated failings of for-profit prisons have led Arizonans to ask some big questions.

Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by the police on the sidewalk outside a shop a year ago this Friday. The battle over his death isn’t only about policing, but about public space. It’s about real estate and urban renewal, lines that should not be crossed, and places that are off limits to certain people. And it’s about public places where African-Americans and others are supposed to be invisible, without access to their infrastructure and amenities.

Sandra Bland died in police custody in a Texas jail after a traffic stop. In a video shot by a passer-by, Bland protests that her head is being slammed to the ground during her arrest. Local authorities are calling her death a suicide, but friends and family do not believe that explanation. Twitter users have launched the hashtag #IfIDieInPoliceCustody to counter the narratives that often follow the deaths of unarmed black men and women in police custody.

“The New Horizons mission is a stunning validation of not only astronomy and physics, but of science itself. ... No astrologer could have given us this information. Alchemy could not have powered the rockets so powerfully and precisely ... This will be remembered as an achievement of our species, of our civilization, and of the power of science.”

Just as with the American subprime crisis, and the current plight of many American cities, Wall Street’s predatory lending played an important although little-recognized role. Undoubtedly, Greece suffers from years of corruption and tax avoidance by its wealthy. But Goldman wasn’t an innocent bystander: It padded its profits by leveraging Greece to the hilt—along with much of the rest of the global economy.