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Friday Nite Videos | January 20, 2023

Portside
Life And Death 3,000,000 Years Ago. Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young) | Woodstock (We Are Stardust). The Other Big Lie. Why Saving Kids Is Bad Business in America. ARGENTINA, 1985 | Movie.

The Other Big Lie

Mother Jones video journalist Garrison Hayes and essayist Anthony Conwright examine the white grievance on display at the January 6 insurrection and trace it to the suppression of Black civil rights in the post-Civil War period.

books

The Legacy of a Caged Bird

On Gene Andrew Jarrett’s “Paul Laurence Dunbar” Los Angeles Review of Books
During his lifetime, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American, was among the most famous poets in the United States. It is one of the great paradoxes of the early Jim Crow era. This biography sheds new light on the writer's life and work.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction

Jamelle Bouie The New York Times
Du Bois’s mode of analysis in "Black Reconstruction" can help us look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts.

Our Segregation Problem

Aziz Rana Dissent Magazine
Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction Is Essential Reading

Jeff Goodwin Convergence
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. It’s also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism.

W.E.B. DuBois’ Abolition Democracy

Gerald Horne The Nation
What distinguished DuBois' close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. Black Reconstruction was his first extended effort to shine Marxism’s sweeping floodlight on the tortured history of his homeland.

The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left

Dale Kretz Convergence
The Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property. We should draw on that memory today for struggles against racism and capitalism.
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