Portside

A new video from Equal Justice Initiative argues we need more memorials devoted to remembering racial violence.

“If the president pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.”

A year after racial discontent neared levels not seen since the Rodney King beating case, the country finds itself convulsed by controversies over neo-Nazis emboldened by Donald Trump’s rise to power. Now, a burst of new films, many of them documentaries, are taking a deep look beyond the headlines at the lasting impact that racial schisms and racism have on Americans’ everyday lives.

The truth shall make you a target; Arpaio’s Buchenwald; Bye bye Big Biz?; Texas turnabout; Black hat backlash; Teen Vogue throws down

To pardon a public official who refuses to obey the law (especially a direct court order) is to give the finger to the judiciary, and thus our constitutional order. It encourages further lawlessness. It unleashes bias, hate, vigilantism, mob rule. And it hits where the rubber meets the street.

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

"You would think that activists would just be exhausted and giving up, but not only are they getting louder, they're banding together and making their voices heard at every turn."

To portray Ronald Reagan as a friend of the working class is not only fallacious—it is dangerous.

While sexual harassment is certainly an issue, we need to look deeper at gender bias. Women who do make it to the upper ranks have often been told that they were only given that job or that award because they are women, implying that the field is admitting less-deserving women simply to increase their numbers. In fact, these studies show that many of the women in science must be more capable than the men, to even have advanced in the field. And who wants to admit that?

Historian Nancy MacLean, author of the best-selling "Democracy in Chains," argues that privatizing public education is a dream of the radical right dating back to the segregationist South.