Portside

Nike and Kaep; Confederacy North; Wages of #MeToo; SCOTUS bait and switch; Chapo Chaps; Requiem for The Voice

As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That's a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, 'You mean we privatized the prisons so there's no profit unless the prison is full?' You'd think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We're creating so many of our own problems.”

Monuments to Confederate soldiers and generals hold prominent positions in dozens of cities across the southern United States. Over the weekend, one of them - a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia - became the site of a violent clash by white supremacists against anti-racist counter-protesters. There are movements in states across the country to remove them. Help identify these monuments to racism and slavery. List of these monuments.

The powerful image of Bree Newsome climbing the 30-foot flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House in the aftermath of the the Charleston Massacre to remove the Confederate flag is now ingrained in my memory and the collective memory of America. To see city and state governments following suit has brought about a bitter feeling of approval for me. It shouldn’t have taken a massacre to get to this point.

New Orleans is better for being rid of the monuments that commemorated the mythology and actual history of slavery and segregation. But elites still govern. The politics of representation dovetails with the reigning discourse of diversity and a local political economy based on marketing "cultural authenticity. To the extent that antiracism centers of pursuit of recognition rather than altering patterns of distribution it will remain trapped in neoliberal inequakity.

Reader Comments: Response to Occupy; Greece and Debt Forgiveness; Why Bernie Sanders; Confederate Flags, Symbols, and Racism; U.S. Torture Program; Death Penalty; and more... Announcements: Benefit Concert for Civil Rights; Rally for Eric Garner; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and The Voting Rights Act at 50; Rosenberg Case Bombshell - Key Witness Lied; Robert Meeropol statement

The flag may be wiped from state grounds and license plates, but its ideals live on in the GOP agenda

The Washington football team's name is a dictionary-defined slur—and now the federal Patent and Trademark Office has been ordered to cancel its trademark registration.

Jon Batiste & Stay Human -- St. James Infirmary. Megan Rapinoe: 'Being Yourself Is Most Important.' Retrumplican Party. Rep. Jenny Horne on the Confederate Flag. Movie: What Happened, Miss Simone?