‘The Snake’: How Trump Appropriated a Radical Black Singer’s Lyrics for Immigration Fearmongering

Eli Rosenberg The Washington Post
The lyrics have a far more complex origin than Trump’s use might imply. The poem originated in the 1960s from a soul singer and social activist in Chicago, Oscar Brown Jr. Its appropriation as a tool to drum up fear about immigrants has turned heads; some of Brown’s family are asking Trump to stop using it. And now, people are reading deeper into the president’s fixation with the parable.

The Far Right's Toxic Forbears: Super-Wealthy Secessionist Slaveholders

James Brewer Stewart History News Network
We’ve identified people in our history who look and behave strikingly like the Koch brothers and their associates—specifically a small group that is mega-wealthy, super- privileged, highly self aware, morally self-confident, ideologically driven and deeply engaged in long-term efforts to seize the levers of government and upend American democracy. By this historian’s reckoning, it is, in general, the Old South’s slave owning aristocracy.

books

Why Do White People Like What I Write?

Pankaj Mishra London Review of Books
Writers once busy in prestigious magazines rationalizing war and torture are now confronting the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original racial sin. Coates wonders why those once fierce in defending bloody imperial missions now embrace him for describing American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims. Yet the danger for Coates is not so much seduction by power as a distorted perspective caused by proximity to it.

Kept Out

Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez Reveal
For people of color, banks are shutting the door to homeownership.

There’s No ‘Red Scare.’ So What Is Right-Wing Violence About?

Michele Prospero il manifesto
The radical right is useful for the mainstream right to cover over the accumulation of wealth that would be difficult to defend, and to channel the resentment of the precarious classes who are rights-deprived against the “others,” against “alien cultures” invading “the homeland.”

As Germany Honors Those Who Fought Fascism, We Must Honor Those Who Fought White Supremacy

David Bacon Truthout
Graves form part of a collective memory of socialism. They force an acknowledgement of the ideas those revolutionaries died to defend. Fascism's armies sought to bury those ideas forever, along with the people who held them, in the Nazis' "thousand-year Reich." Learning lessons from Germany for our struggle against those that fought against racism, slavery, the Confederacy and white supremacy.

Tidbits - February 8, 2018 - Reader Comments: Nunes Memo; Puerto Rico; Union Membership; Medicare for All; Teaching Slavery; Antonio Gramsci; Trump's Military Parade - in song; Olympic Truce Actions; Scholarships for Young Activists; and more ....

Portside
Reader Comments: Nunes Memo - Big Dud; Puerto Rico - many still without power; Union Membership Growth...Amidst Decline; Medicare for All - Canadian Readers Tell Their Story; Teaching Slavery; Antonio Gramsci; Trump's Military Parade - in song; Olympic Truce Actions; Cuba's Historic Literacy Campaign; The Puerto Rican Socialist Party; Scholarships for Young Activists; 50th Anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre; and more....

books

The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame

Annette Gordon-Reed The New York Review of Books
This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.

“This Is an Era Defined by the Rise of Women” - 11th Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture with Angela Davis

Angelina Giannopoulou transform! europe
Angela Davis’s feminism was born through Marxism, and through theory and collective struggles as well. These two steps opened the road for a feminism that includes poor and black women, standing out against mainstream white, bourgeois feminism. It is not even possible to speak of a white feminism anymore, not only in the USA, but also in Europe. Europe is no longer a white continent.

Raising Consciousness About The Color of Law

Steve Early CounterPunch
In it, he documents how racial segregation in housing did long-term damage to African-American family wealth, income, job opportunities, and access to good public education.
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