Portside

Officials calling for calm can offer no rational justification for Gray's death, and so they appeal for order.

As Baltimore is policed like occupied territory today, remembering James Baldwin's words about Harlem in 1966. This article originally appeared in the July 11, 1966 issue of The Nation.

Baltimore is the latest city to crack down on unpaid residential water bills, despite concerns that the practice violates basic human rights. Meanwhile, the city’s corporate debtors continue to run their taps unaffected.

Punishing the poor; Nuns off the hook; Hip-Hop to the rescue; Women inmates turn prison inside-out; American PEN and Charlie Hebdo

What underlies most of these militarized forms of policing is a cynical politics of race that has perverted criminal justice policies; they are no longer about crime or justice, but instead the management of poor and non-white populations through ever-more-punitive practices. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, describes how modern criminal justice policy was driven by a Republican effort to appeal to white voters in the South and then also by Democrats...

An unarmed man spent a week dying after being chased by police and suffering a lethal injury over the course of a mysterious 45-minute encounter. He was one of too many to name and the ensuing chaos is wholly the fault of the Baltimore Police Department and our broken system of law enforcement in this country.

It is not just the U.S. image that is suffering. Drone strikes create more enemies of the United States. While Faisal Shahzad was pleading guilty to trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square, he told the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”

The reason that this case is so important is because it invites the Court to create a new legal landscape surrounding the constitutional rights to same-sex marriage—and protection from state laws that discriminate by treating same-sex couples unequally. Whatever the Court decides in its ruling expected this June will likely hold for many years—at least until the Court’s conservatives are replaced.

All 550 candidates of the Communist Party (CP), Turkey that will be running in the upcoming elections in June are women. According to a recent statement released by the CP, the reason for choosing all women candidates is not simply about the active participation of women in the political struggle but because it is only women who can represent the rebellion against a social order that thrives on murdering and humiliating them on a daily basis.

Should we be wondering if the prosecution of cheating Atlanta teachers for racketeering was racist? Or should black parents and educators be leading a movement against high-stakes standardized testing as the gateway tool to privatizing public education in black and brown communities across the country?