Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.
When objectivity is impossible, and other media mishugas
A century after violent efforts to suppress resistance to class exploitation, the nation has learned to think about people and the economy with a language that favors the wealthy and elides issues of power.
Dalit activist and writer Gogu Shyamala’s debut collection of short stories, Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But . . . , explores caste, tradition, and exploitation in contemporary India without romanticism.
Soul City was a boondoggle—not a story of lost or forgotten roads tragically not taken.
The poor are what Dr. King once called “a new and unsettling force” capable of transforming “our complacent national life.”
Throughout U.S. history, class has been bound up with other forms of oppression—so the disenfranchisement of Black men after Reconstruction decisively shifted class relations.
The stories in Standing Up are linked thematically and appear in chronological order, beginning with 1970. For those of us who have similarly spent time as organizers, the book feels like an anthropological field trip into the past.
Unions raise wages and benefits and increase job security. So, the fact that unionization rates are still in decline, despite some recent bright spots in worker militancy, is very bad news.
She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?
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