Portside

One can delude one's self into believing that race can be avoided; but at the most awkward moments, it rears its ugly head and tears movements apart. In fact, it is the #BlackLivesMatter movement that has elevated this question to a national discussion point. There is an important segment of the progressive movement who strongly believe that economic injustice and a narrowly defined version of class can and must serve as the unifying feature of a progressive movement.

This month, the nation acknowledges two political milestones. On Aug. 9, we mark the one-year anniversary of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Two days later, we mark the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Watts. A third civil disturbance offers lessons learned from failures of 1965. It provides a blueprint for how we might begin to rebuild Ferguson and the many American communities that look like Ferguson. The third milestone is the 1992 unrest in South Los Angeles.

Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population.

New report details perverse policies that are driving more people into hopeless, inescapable poverty.

What underlies most of these militarized forms of policing is a cynical politics of race that has perverted criminal justice policies; they are no longer about crime or justice, but instead the management of poor and non-white populations through ever-more-punitive practices. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, describes how modern criminal justice policy was driven by a Republican effort to appeal to white voters in the South and then also by Democrats...

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For the first time in Ferguson, Missouri's history, half of the city council will be black. The city's residents are predominantly black, but their council members have been predominantly white.

Emails between officers and city official – including one joking about stoning Muslim women and image used to mock Michelle Obama – now made public

Now and historically, it is the youth who reject taken-for-granted injustices. In this moment, young people are the social actors – the leadership, catalysts, the activists, and the organizers – who seized and defined a continuing travesty of North American life: the police murder of Black lives. Rising up against the thickening layers of institutionalized white supremacy, young people are insisting that Black Lives Matter.

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