Our own progress against racism in the United States remains too recent, too fragile, and too incomplete to go on abetting apartheid in Israel.
Reader Comments - Today's Student Protests; Vietnam War History, My Lai; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; Israel - Right Wing Nation with Nukes; Unions Key to Fighting Inequality; Women Fighters; Venezuela Sanctions; Socialists, Socialist Movement and Socialism; Human Genome Tinkering;
Hey, World! Let's create a nuclear-free future -- April 24-26, New York City
Remembering Jean Hardisty, Geraldine Blankinship and Grace Paley
The movement led by Cesar Chavez , Dolores Huerta and others created a union and reduced the oppression of farm workers for a time. Then the corporations and the Right Wing forces adapted their strategies of oppression. The assault on the UFW and the current reconquest of power in the fields are examples of strategic racism, that is a system of racial oppression created and enforced because it benefits the over class -- in this case corporate agriculture.
In the Western lexicon of human migration there are still lot of remnants of a white supremacist ideology, with hierarchical classes of words created to differentiate white people from the rest of humanity, with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat.” What is an expat? And who is an expat? Expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people who go to work abroad.
Popular culture may be getting more diverse in terms of gender and skin color, but it's still mostly flat in presenting diverse human qualities and differences. Few characters play against type, which makes the exceptions all the more remarkable. Part of the power of characters playing against type is simply their insistence, humorous and without qualified explanation, of their existence. In other words, like most of comedy, its power is better experienced, not explained
Last week Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. It had been nominated in both poetry and criticism, the first book to be so doubly nominated. A bold, book of experimental writing that takes on the "invisible" practices of everyday person-to-person, interactive racism, Rankine's book is as illuminating as it is, at times, wrenching. Here Parul Sehgal guides us through this outstanding work of contemporary literature.
Reader Comments - Ferguson and Racism; Venezuela - New Coup, Made in USA; Selma, Voting Rights and Today; International Women's Day, Wonder Woman; Netanyahu, Israel, GOP and Iran; Wisconsin Attack on Unions; Ukraine; Death Penalty, 'Justice', Incarceration; Leonard Nimoy; Books on Upton Sinclair, Michael Harrington;
Announcement - Triangle Shirtwaist Fire commemoration;
Today in History
A new AFL-CIO Commission on Racial and Economic Justice will attempt to create a "safe, structured and constructive opportunity for local union leaders to discuss issues pertaining to the persistence of racial injustice today in the workforce and in their communities, and to ensure that the voices of all working people in the labor movement are heard."
The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote. The Selma anniversary offers lawmakers a prime opportunity to move from symbolism to substance.
Darren Wilson was innocent. If only the city's cops offered their own citizens the same due process he received.
Spread the word