BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions.
The campaigns of the two candidates in Georgia in the July 24 runoff for the Republican nomination, Casey Cagle and Brian Kemp, are replete with openly racist attacks and blatantly xenophobic rhetoric, particularly targeted at Latinx immigrants.
Imagine a quickly assembled militia, with legally purchased firearms and military-like training, having a standoff with US Border Patrol over the family separations that have occurred at the border of the United States and Mexico.
As we come together to speak out against these horrendous actions at the border, it is important that we also examine why these children and families have evoked such strong emotional response from the public, and with white liberals specifically.
Becky Rafter could have been among the 67% of white women voters in Alabama who cast their lot with Roy Moore. She grew up all over the South, including an Alabama small town shaped by white flight. Reared in a household of modest means in rental housing, her parents budgeted every dollar. Their financial planning, aid, and scholarships allowed her to sometimes attend private school, with the added help of white privilege. Maybe it was growing up queer in the South or the dissonance of the segregated societies of her childhood.
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.
In America, white supremacy is the establishment — not part of it, but all of it, our politics, prisons, schools. And white supremacy dominates our food, our media, even our escapism.
Addressing our systems of White supremacy cannot be dismissed as “identity politics.”
"Mudbound" is about how things change—slowly, unevenly, painfully. It is also, as the title suggests, about how things don’t change, about the stubborn forces of custom, prejudice and power that lock people in place and impede social progress. Set mainly in the Mississippi Delta in the years just after World War II, when Jim Crow was still enshrined in law and practice, the film tests and complicates Faulkner’s much-quoted claim about the not-even-pastness of the past.
Suddenly I was a pregnant and unemployed woman of color living in a country that had just elected a white supremacist as our president.
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