Politics Archives - Page 29 of 143

Feature

How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence

The movement fosters an environment of fear, hatred, and racism

June 9, 2020 • by Adam Quinn

In the aftermath of the killings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte at the hands of police, the Blue Lives Matter hashtag rallied around a video of a group of black youth attacking a white man and taking his pants off in a parking garage ...

How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence

Activism

The “Buffalo Protestor”

On Martin Gugino, friend and fellow activist

June 9, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

I too reacted with horror at seeing the video of a 75-year-old man bleeding from the head after being shoved to the ground by Buffalo police. My stomach turned tighter when I realized, “Wait, I know that guy.” And now the president has tweeted about him, spinning the grotesque falsehood ...

Politics

If Everyone Else Is the Problem, You Probably Aren’t Seeing Things Clearly

Why effective anti-racism demands reflexivity

June 8, 2020 • by Musa al-Gharbi

In general, whites and socioeconomic elites in America feel a greater sense of entitlement and belonging, and a stronger conviction that social institutions exist to serve them and promote their interests. Within these groups, progressives are much more likely than conservatives to view various forms of state intervention as the ...

If Everyone Else Is the Problem, You Probably Aren’t Seeing Things Clearly

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

Activism

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

Now everywhere quoted, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” serves as a thoughtful shorthand for understanding the jagged edge of today’s unrest. But even in Dr. King’s time, it was not particularly radical wisdom. In 1967, the Kerner Commission was tasked by ...

Activism

An American Reckoning

The fire this time

June 4, 2020 • by Deva Woodly

In 1844, James Russell Lowell penned the anti-slavery poem “The Present Crisis” in response to the political tumult leading up to the Civil War. Inspired by Lowell’s poem, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called its official magazine The Crisis, with W. E. B. Du Bois as ...

Activism

What Is to Be Done?

Three scholars of democracy respond to the protests

June 4, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia

I believe this extraordinary nationwide mobilization is the best answer possible to the Democrats who engineered the destruction of the Sanders primary campaign -- I mean Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, James Carville, James Clyburn, Pete Buttigieg, and the innumerable reporters and media “experts” who from the beginning insisted ...

Activism

The Anti-Racist Uprising in Brooklyn

A report from the streets

June 3, 2020 • by Natasha Lennard

Since March, sirens have become a consistent soundtrack where I live in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. For weeks, this was the sound of ambulances, ushering thousands to nearby hospitals from the predominantly African American area, hard hit by the pandemic. But in recent days, the sirens have carried a different meaning. Night ...

Politics

Has Trump’s Reichstag Moment Finally Arrived?

An authoritarian leader wielding the violent power of the state is a hallmark of fascism

June 2, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

“I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson, and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans,“ Trump declared, while police fired tear gas against protesters demonstrating outside the White House. “If a city or state refuses ...

Has Trump’s Reichstag Moment Finally Arrived?

Race

Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal

How pious white anti-racism can contribute to racist behavior

May 29, 2020 • by Musa al-Gharbi

It is unclear what the appropriate consequences for something like this should be, given how dire the consequences of her actions could have been (as recent events in Minneapolis sadly confirm). However, Ms. Cooper has already paid a high price for her transgression: She has been publicly shamed and terminated ...

Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal

North America

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

“Be it therefore resolved, the Democratic Socialists of America will not endorse another Democratic Party presidential candidate should Bernie Sanders not prevail”

May 28, 2020 • by Andrew Sernatinger

I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the fall of 2017. I’m a millennial, but by then, I’d been an activist for the better part of twenty years. I’d been in the anti-war movement as a high school student after 9/11. I grew up in the suburbs of ...

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

Democracy

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague

May 28, 2020 • by Emily Pitts Donahoe

We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase. Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...