Portside

University of Illinois graduate student workers went on strike Monday after last-minute negotiations over the weekend failed to end a protracted contract dispute that has lasted nearly a year.

As Ava DuVernay prepares to release Disney’s eagerly anticipated A Wrinkle in Time adaptation, which has put her in the history books as the first woman of color to direct a film with a $100 million-plus budget, she cautions against thinking that Hollywood has finally solved its diversity problems.

Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.

In the tumultuous 1970s, women and people of color streamed into unions, strikes swept the country — and employers launched a fierce counter-attack.

The original Heathers were a group of croquet-playing WASPy socialites; the new Heathers are comprised of a plus-size girl, a genderqueer student, and a black girl. In other words, this is less a reboot and more an intentional inversion of the original concept, built on the premise that the bullied have since become the bullies.

It’s actually illegal for teachers to strike in West Virginia. They’re doing it anyway. Thousands of public school teachers across West Virginia went on strike this week in protest over their pay and benefits, affecting more than 277,000 students.

Some companies are now using monitoring techniques—referred to as “people analytics”—to learn as much as they can about you, from your communication patterns to what types of websites you visit to how often you use the bathroom.

The Wall goes on, but as the El Paso poet Abigail Carl-Klassen announces: “We’re still here. In protest. In Pachanga. Fists raised.”

Power depends on correlation of strength. The bourgeoisie and its minions use the judicial power to suit their interests as if this was a monarchy, with no oversight by society. They trampled on the Constitution in order to reach their goals. The working class has only one space where it can exert its political power: mobilization on the streets.

Writers once busy in prestigious magazines rationalizing war and torture are now confronting the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original racial sin. Coates wonders why those once fierce in defending bloody imperial missions now embrace him for describing American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims. Yet the danger for Coates is not so much seduction by power as a distorted perspective caused by proximity to it.