Portside

Historians are so accustomed to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society that we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites.

Cleveland's baseball team flaunts the most spectacularly racist logo in professional sports. When the American League Championship series shifted to Toronto, a First Nations activist, Douglas Cardinal, went to Ontario court to bar the logo from being worn while the team played in Toronto, deeming the name and logo to be violations of the Ontario Human Rights code. Major League Baseball and the Cleveland Indians' front office sent 27 lawyers to challenge this.

Reader Comments: Two Weeks to Go - Dump Trump, Defeat Racism and Misogyny; Learning to Claim Our Victories; Bernie Sanders' Donor Network Comes Thru for House and Senate Candidates; John Oliver on Third Parties; Support Hillary, Then Fight Like Hell; and: Remembering Tom Hayden; Syria; Silencing Librarians; DuBois and the Fight for Peace; Bob Dylan; Announcements; and more...

“Left-wing populism” makes clear that boundaries that create and represent identities do not run between people of different geographical origin, but among those at the bottom and at the top of society. This is a useful and appropriate populism. It has nothing to do with right-wing populism: the Others on the other side of the fence are not foreigners, but the richest 10 percent of society.

It is with deep concern that I write to address the ongoing travesty inflicted on the residents of one small, impoverished community: Uniontown, Perry County, in Alabama's Black Belt. My family has lived in Uniontown for many generations and, as a longtime resident, I have observed with sadness the harmful effects, distress, and heartache Uniontown citizens have experienced since the establishment of Arrowhead Landfill.

The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.

'More Southern Dudes Need to Say Black Lives Matter.' From police treatment of African-Americans to the current presidential election, the issues roiling America today have led the Drive-By Truckers to drill down on the topic that has preoccupied them for 20 years - the South - while bringing a relatively unheard perspective to pop music's discourse: that of the progressive white Southerner.

'Luckily, not everyone has been glued to the screen, eternally watching The Donald. From Black Lives Matter to the climate change movement, activists have, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out, never stopped working to make this a better world and, as she indicates, if we can take our eyes off the media spectacle-cum-circus for a few moments, they offer us a kind of hope for our future that shouldn't be ignored.' - Tom Engelhardt