Portside

In every Southern state with the death penalty activists are working to abolish it. They include civil rights activists who focus on the system's racial bias, faith leaders who view the work as part of their ministry, and even family members of victims who seek closure but not vengeance.

Social justice protest offers an indispensable and even inspiring view of US history. At the same time, movements for social change must be placed within their historical and social context. In truth, activists often have to rely on middle-class alliances in and out of the political establishment while forging compromises, even unsavory ones, before achieving success.

The Egyptian-born, Brooklyn-based poet Marwa Halal focuses on the absurdity of labeling diverse people inhabiting a certain portion of our global maps as part of the same (misunderstood) "middle east."

While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

`It's exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn't go over there, they couldn't eat in that place,' the American actor tells an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.

After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. Bernie Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity. His emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders's run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.

Much commentary on the late Chuck Berry will focus on how his songs expressed fun and teenage angst. This is the right thing to do. Yet there’s more. For example, Berry’s obsession with the comparative qualities of fast cars — most brilliantly displayed in his song “Maybellene” — did not just reflect the rise of post-WW II consumerist culture....He preferred V-8 Fords over Cadillacs because he spent several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s helping make Ford cars.

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No candidate has ever run for the presidency promising to raise the retirement age, end formal employment protection and greatly expand outsourcing. Nobody would ever get elected saying these things. The only way to remove the labor rights that we fought for over the last 100 years was through a coup such as the one in Brazil that forced Dilma Rousseff out of office. Workers have responded by strikes, demonstrations and massive rallies.

The integration of women students into the elite all-male Ivy League student bodies was a relatively recent (largely late1960s) phenomenon, the product less of a broader consciousness among university trustees and more due to the fact that these universities were losing a share of high-achieving college men to other elite schools that were already co-educational.