Portside

When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does. In college, she read James Baldwin, giving the sense of meeting someone who knew her better, than she had herself. This came as a shock, not necessarily because he said I was sick. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American”.

The NBA legend, who once faced withering criticism after he converted to Islam and changed his name, argues that NFL players need to step up in solidarity and defend an outspoken black quarterback fighting for social justice and a job.

Women in migration are not ‘vulnerable,’ in need of ‘rescue’—they are advocates and agents of change. Current migration policies must be changed from being about ‘protecting women’ to ‘protecting women’s rights. The rights of capital to move freely across borders is unchallenged. There must be a commensurate expansion of the rights of migrant workers forced to cross borders.

The creator of Insecure, Issa Rae, talks about blackness as season two begins.

Poetry to grow your soul.

For three decades, eight members of the Quimpo family dedicated themselves to the anti-Marcos resistance in the Philippines, sometimes at profound personal cost. In this memoir, they tell stories that comprise a family saga of revolution, persistence, and, ultimately, vindication, even as easy resolution eluded them. The authors are also critical of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its rural-based strategy of protracted people’s war.

But for both America and me, Ferguson was different, because it was now. Because of social media, the 24-hour access to media and the domino effect of protests that rippled through cities across the country, white America could finally see up close what was going on.

"The union I am privileged to lead suffered two troubling events this past week. First, a former high-ranking UAW official, now deceased, was implicated in an indictment from the Department of Justice accusing him and other co-conspirators of misappropriating funds from the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC). Second, workers at Nissan’s Canton, Miss. plant voted against unionizing."

That the Nazis based their racist laws in large part on U.S. white supremacist law is a widely known fact. This new study is a contemporary and detailed look at the correspondences between the two legal regimes.

Ironically, healthcare reform efforts have sought to "improve and expand" every element of the present system, except the program that works best: Medicare. The Clintons tried to expand HMOs, Obama expanded private health insurance and Medicaid, the GOP tried to expand "individual purchase. Medicare—if improved and expanded to all—could confront the industry, contain prices and restore the values of caring and community to our healthcare system.