Tag
Social Movements
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An Open Letter to Prison Officials on the Censorship of “Tip of the Spear”
Your censorship of my book must be understood within a broader context.
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Jewish Fragility
When I receive appeals from Jewish organizations exhorting me to fight antisemitism—which, they claim, is on the rise here and abroad—I tend to toss them away. During many periods of time, and in many places, it has been dangerous to be Jewish; but that hardly seems true today. In Europe, the catastrophe of the Shoah…
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“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”
When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists …
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The State Will Not Save Us
In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
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And the Women Shall Lead Us
Our historical and contemporary images of black nationalism privilege the masculine. This is true whether in distant or recent memory. Images of black men dressed …
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Rethinking Civil Rights, Reimagining Black Liberation
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter ushered in a new era of social …
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Are Sharp Women Enough?
Twitter was a medium made for Dorothy Parker—alas, a century too late. Her famous poem “Resumé” is 141 characters. Her breakout feature in Vanity Fair, a series of Hate Songs, begs for a hashtag …
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Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist …
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Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential …
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Ireland’s Uneasy Monuments
“History,” writes Fergal Keane, “began with my father’s stories.” These were stories of Oliver Cromwell’s murders, of the dead of the Irish Famine, of wars of …
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Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications distributed at bus stops, markets, and municipal services offices.1 In 2007, I learned that 50,000 Chileans had submitted entries to the…
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Virtual Roundtable on Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons
Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?
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When the Klan Returns
For nearly a century, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan has seemed an exception that proves a rule. Far-right movements typically eschew electoral politics, as earlier and later waves of the Klan also did. But in the 1920s the Klan ran successful candidates for state and local offices. The US far right has generally found its…
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Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer representations in India. While the verdict was the result of extended campaigns by the Naz Foundation and others, the euphoria that followed the Delhi High Court’s…
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The Big Picture: Building a Climate Coalition
Donald J. Trump has given notice of US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015 and made clear that his administration is committed to dismantling the government-based scientific and policy infrastructure created during the Obama administration to cope with the dangers of climate change. If, as seems likely, these policy shifts help to…
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The Problem with Philanthropy
In The Self Help Myth, Erica Kohl-Arenas shows how hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and decades of advocacy have failed to address the poverty …
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The Art of Protest
I marched with thousands on the streets of New York, asserting that “Trump is Not Our President” and “Love Trumps Hate.” So far we are free to assemble on Union Square in New York, to march up Fifth Avenue, to shout our anger, our fear, and our resolve. The street and soil are still ours to share. As I…
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All Ireland in a Grave
A hanged man was never more popular. One hundred years ago, the British government executed Roger Casement for his participation in a rebellion in Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916. This year, schoolchildren and tourists by the thousands have visited Casement’s gravesite in Dublin. It is part of a centennial pilgrimage in honor of the…
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Tell Us How We Did
In 1928, Eric Blair, an unemployed, itinerant writer and former British colonial policeman, went to work as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel. Five years later, under the pen name George Orwell, Blair would assemble his reflections on the lives of Parisian service laborers into the first part of a gritty satirical memoir called, Down…
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On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
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Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the 1920s: An Interview With Shannon King
This month, I interviewed Shannon King about his new book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era. Dr. King is Associate …
