film

Review: "Mudbound" Is a Racial Epic Tuned to Black Lives, and White Guilt

A.O. Scott New York Times
"Mudbound" is about how things change—slowly, unevenly, painfully. It is also, as the title suggests, about how things don’t change, about the stubborn forces of custom, prejudice and power that lock people in place and impede social progress. Set mainly in the Mississippi Delta in the years just after World War II, when Jim Crow was still enshrined in law and practice, the film tests and complicates Faulkner’s much-quoted claim about the not-even-pastness of the past.

Too Poor to Vote: How Alabama's 'New Poll Tax' Bars Thousands of People from Voting

Connor Sheets AL.com
In nine states from Nevada to Tennessee, anyone who has lost been imprisoned and lost thier right to vote, cannot regain it until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution. In Alabama, that requirement has fostered an underclass of thousands of people who are unable to vote because they do not have enough money.

labor

The Racist Origins of Right to Work

Michael Pierce Labor Notes
As alt-right and white supremacist movements grow it is important to revisit history and see the ways in which most hate movements are intertwined.

Democracy's Critics

Colin Gordon Jacobin
You can't understand the modern right without understanding their fundamental contempt for democracy.

The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism

Sarah Jaffe New York Times
The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase.

books

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

Walter Johnson Boston Review
Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

books

The Genius of James Brown

Geoffrey O'Brien New York Review of Books
Even in the era of the Beatles and Motown's roster of stars, the brilliant James Brown established a place that was his alone. His was not about magic, it was about power that could not be denied by anyone brought within its field of influence. What the book's author also finds is a wary solitariness that paradoxically found its fullest expression in Brown's ability to give himself so completely in performance to suggest a generosity approaching self-immolation.

The Significance of Simone Manuel's Swim is Clear if You Know Jim Crow

Kevin B. Blackistone Washington Post
There is a reason why 70 percent of black teenagers, like those who died in Shreveport, and 60 percent of Hispanic teenagers can’t swim. But it isn’t due to some genetic disorder, as some actually believe. It is because of abject irrational racism and Jim Crow and its vestiges.

What Can Be Learned from Hillary Clinton's Slurs Against Reconstruction

Ryan Cooper The Week
Monday night, Hillary Clinton butchered Reconstruction's history. It's a good opportunity to correct the record, and glean why Lincoln really was America's greatest president. Reconstruction in reality was a briefly successful attempt to build a true democracy in the South. Clinton implies that it was Southern anger at unjust Reconstruction policy that led them to institute Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was the goal from the very end of the war.
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