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‘White Trash’ — The Original Underclass

Alec MacGillis ProPublica
Much of the political debate this election season concerns who will win the support of working class white voters. At the same time, as Alec MacGillis notes in this review of two new books on the history and present conditions of this sector of the population, much of this discourse strains under the influence of condescension, sentimentalism, and a host of explicitly or implicitly stated biases.

Memorial in Alabama Will Honor Victims of Lynching

Campbell Robertson The New York Times
The Equal Justice Initiative, a legal rights organization in Montgomery, is to formally announce the plans on Tuesday. The Equal Justice Initiative will unveil plans for a museum to open in April, in its roughly 11,000-square-foot headquarters, that will trace the country’s racial history from slavery to the era of mass incarceration.

Milwaukee’s War on Black People

Sarah Lazare Alternet
Protesters taking to the streets today say that police violence against black residents of Milwaukee remains systemic. “You see anger, just the anger and the frustration of a community that has suffered atrocities and oppression on behalf of what they deem to be the police oppressive system, that has never seemingly been held accountable for taking the life, like the young man said, of their loved ones,” Muhibb Dyer, a community activist said.

Arresting Development

Bakari Kitwana ColorLines
Melina Abdullah, a BLM organizer and chair of Pan African Studies at California State University, L.A., says that local police are using arrests and felony charges to contain a resistance movement pushing to disarm, defund and abolish their departments. “I saw it happen several times; I was present for the targeting,” she says, recalling the way police officers watched and followed Richards over the last several years as they organized actions.