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To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

Walter Johnson Boston Review
Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

Tidbits - October 20, 2016 - Reader Comments: Trump-A Setting Time Bomb; Help Protect Our Elections; Lift Us Up - A song for America; Thoughts on Syria; Announcements; and more ...

Portside
Reader Comments: Trump-A Setting Time Bomb; You Can Help Protect Our Elections; Inequality (and Climate Change) ARE Defining Issues of Our Time; Women Share Rape Stories; Paul Ryan's Fear - GOP Loss is Win for Bernie Sanders; Lift Us Up - A song for America (Sung by Bethany Yarrow; written by Peter Yarrow); Thoughts on Syria; Announcements: 70th Anniversary of Southern Youth Legislature; Justice for Laquan - Chicago; Book Talk: Women Fight the Islamic State

books

Slavery and Property: The Great Trap

Maya Jasanoff The New York Review of Books
As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.

Both Trump and Clinton Curb Press Access - Plane Rides and Presidential Transparency

Jim Rutenberg, Media Mediator The New York Times
Breaking with historic tradition, both Clinton and Trump do no allow reporters to travel with them. This is about something much bigger than eyewitness accounts and plane rides. It's about how much we want to know about each candidate's plans for the White House, and how open and accessible we want them to be as president. And ultimately, it's about whether we truly believe in the premise that transparency is vital for democracy.

books

Naming America's Own Genocide

Richard White The Nation
Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged by some 80 percent. The book painstakingly recapitulates the systematic homicidal culling of the state's native American tribes . While not the final word on the ubiquity of the term genocide worldwide, it establishes that murder was the preferred and accepted method of social control for white settlers, gold miners. state militias and federal policy makers. The long-term consequences were staggering.

Looking Back, Looking Forward Resolving the Left Impasse Over Elections

Kurt Stand The Stansbury Forum
Defining a social justice agenda primarily in reaction to Clinton (oppose her, back her), or Trump (fight him, ignore him), allows the dominant two-party system to set the tone, reduces independent politics to slogans without substance. Failure to look at the whole political environment rather than any one aspect of it, has led to lost opportunities in the past.

Tidbits - July 21, 2016 - Reader Comments: Racism in Police Shootings; NLRB More Activist than Labor?; Abdication of the Left?; Free State of Jones; Tair Kaminer Released; Jay-Z and Beyoncé; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Tair Kaminer Released; Racism in Police Shootings; NLRB Become as More Activist than Labor?; Socialism Comes to Philadelphia; Portside readers have differing views on both the Abdication of the Left and the movie, the Free State of Jones; United States-Land of Terrorists and Massacres; Is Anti-Zionism Inherently Anti-Semitic?; Jay-Z and Beyoncé are donating $1.5m to Black Lives Matter

Atoning for Washington’s ‘Mass Kidnapping’ in the Indian Ocean

Davis Vine Foreign Policy in Focus
Between 1968 and 1973, the two governments concealed the expulsion from the world. If anyone asked, Anglo-American officials decided to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos” were “transient contract workers,” as one bureaucrat explained. A British official called the Chagossians “Tarzans” and “Man Fridays,” in a tellingly racist reference to Robinson Crusoe.
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