Portside

Trump's proposal taps into a reservoir of racism that is part of American history. FDR ordered American-born and immigrant Japanese people into prison camps at the outset of World War II, one of the worst violations of the Constitution. From the moment the first slave was taken off a ship in colonial America, African-Americans have been subjected to violent racism. So have Latino immigrants, another Trump target. Anti-Islam feeling is rampant...all it needs is a leader.

Downward mobility plus racial resentment is a potent combination with disastrous consequences. We know now that election 2016 is increasingly an open portal into an age-old American dark side of slavery, repression, internment, and know-nothing-ism that couldn't be grimmer. And behind it all, running like an interstate highway through our history, is a powerful sense of white skin privilege that has traditionally extended even to those who were relatively powerless.

Recent tragedies have shown all too clearly the state of crisis in which we find ourselves. The Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting illustrates how right-wing hostility to women's rights makes those providing and seeking reproductive services targets for murder. The shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis by white supremacists demonstrates that anyone doing work around racial justice must now expect and prepare for a violent racist response.

A letter by Princeton faculty members says, "Our students are no longer quiet. They have forced all of us to confront the urgency of the moment. Princeton’s deliberate pace at reform often presupposes the sacrifice of those who must endure until we actually change. These students refuse to wait. They have forced the conversation and now we must act. We stand with them as they struggle with the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson and its impact on this campus."

It should shock no one that the odds are even longer if you’re not white, and awful if you’re black. Black Chicagoans lodged 61 percent of the complaints that comprise the CPDP data and white Chicagoans only about 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of the charges deemed sustainable were leveled by black people;58 percent were brought by whites.

GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders came to Allen University Saturday with very different views of the criminal justice system and what should be done to address its failings.

1938-five years after Hitler came to power, after the beginning of the "Final Solution", Jewish refugees were denied entry into the United States. Then it was anti-Semitism and fear of European radicals and communists; today it is anti-Muslim hysteria. Then the U.S. closed its' eyes to the Holocaust; today GOP governors and congressmen are closing the borders while over 250,000 have died in Syria, there are over 3 million refugees and 6.5 million are internally displaced

Black Lives Matter activists are concerned about intra-racial violence. But they don’t see police and prisons as the solution.