Portside

A focus on violence and looting reduces the people of Watts to “rioters” rather than residents confronting social and economic catastrophe. What they burned is less important than what they built, both before and after the insurrection.

On the anniversary of last summer’s Gaza massacre, in the 48th year of Israeli occupation, the 67th year of Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba (the Arabic word for Israel's ethnic cleansing)—and in the fourth century of Black oppression in the present-day United States—we, the undersigned Black activists, artists, scholars, writers, and political prisoners offer this letter of reaffirmed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

On Aug. 8, 2015, as the Black community prepared to collectively mourn the anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown by Ferguson police, members of Black Lives Matter disrupted a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle. In the week since that disruption, at least nine Black people have been killed by state-sanctioned violence. #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrisse Cullors explains why the movement will continue to disrupt the political process.

The Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School are protesting to hold the Chicago Public School system accountable for destabilizing schools in their community. They created the plan to re-open the Dyett as a global leadership and green technology high school.

Today's conflicts in the Middle East is often played out in a language laden with stereotypes. This can also be true of how history is told and understood. Hasan Suroor offers a glimpse of history that breaks through these barriers, in a review of a new book by Seem Alavi. This book focuses on Islam and nationalism in colonial India, but it also offers a nuanced view of relations between Muslims and the West that contests received wisdom.

The omission of any mention of violence toward women in Straight Outta Compton is a particularly potent example of the biopic dilemma, because it connects to the queasiest part of the legacy of N.W.A. Misogyny has always been part of popular music, whether it’s in vaudeville or rock and roll or even today’s booming electronic-dance scene.

it's possible that Pixar’s obsessiveness about work and employment has somehow been effaced in the public eye by the imaginative diversity of their films’ settings: ant colonies, space, the ocean, a bizarre alternate-world inhabited by sentient vehicles, and so on. But in Inside Out, for the first time, the ground beneath Pixar’s ideological feet comes into view, and it’s the Bay Area, California.

The Black Labor Collaborative argues that to confront our foes "in the political Right and global capitalism, demands a transformed and energized labor movement that can fight back with more than slogans of solidarity. No tinkering around the edges! A transformed movement must be authentically inclusive because diversity carries the strongest seeds of change, of untapped creativity.”

Eric Foner on the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

Sesame Street gentrified; Busting journos in Ferguson; Technocapitalism sucks (blood); Trump stomps puny Fox; Cops take to the net