The Birthmark of Damnation: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Black Body

By R.L. Stephens Viewpoint Magazine
What we find all too often in Coates’s narrative universe are bodies without life and a racism without people. To imbue race with an ontological meaning, to make it a reality all its own, is to drain it of its place in history and its indelible roots in discrete human action. To deny the role of life and people — of politics — is to also foreclose the possibility of liberation.

How the U.S. Government Segregated America

Peter C. Baker Pacific Standard Magazine
This book is an updated telling of the history of the federal government's role in creating our nation's racially segregated neighborhoods and all-white suburbs.

Class, Race and Political Strategy in the Rust Belt

Glenn Perusek The Stansbury Forum
Through much of the United States, Washington is viewed with deep suspicion. When unconnected with a higher purpose, said Augustine, the state is nothing more than highway robbery on a larger scale. (2) When was the last time the American state seemed connected to higher purpose? This sensibility is acute in the rust belt, with our towering hulks of shuttered steel mills, machine shops, auto assembly plants and so on.

ALEC and the Minimum Wage

Seth Sandronsky Talking Union, a DSA labor blog
“Taking away local control over wages (and a range of other pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-civil rights policies) has become a major priority of ALEC, a corporate-backed group with extensive lobbying resources and influence in our state legislatures,” according to an National Employment Law Project statement. “ALEC drafts “model” minimum wage preemption bills for conservative legislatures to simply copy and paste.”