Judith Stein and the Historical Materialist Study of American Political History
I first encountered Judith Stein’s work in the spring of 1975, during my last semester of graduate coursework. My friend, professor, and later dissertation advisor, Alex Willingham, either assigned or...
View ArticleHow Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence
In light of recent events we thought to republish Adolph Reed’s 2016 essay on racial disparity and police violence. We include a new introduction to the piece by Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black...
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The Trouble with Disparity
If the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd are supposed to have made visible inequalities that no one had seen, the death rates both from the virus and at the hands of the police have...
View ArticleWhy Black Lives Matter Can’t be Co-opted
A good comrade recently sent this—https://breachmedia.ca/beware-the-neoliberal-co-optation-of-black-lives-matter/ to me without comment. I don’t know anything about the publication, except that the...
View ArticleThe Whole Country is the Reichstag
Jean: I just can’t get over it. Bérenger: Yes, I can see you can’t. Well, it was a rhinoceros—all right, so it was a rhinoceros! It’s miles away by now… miles away… Jean: But you must see it’s...
View Article“Let Me Go Get My Big White Man”: The Clientelist Foundation of Contemporary...
I’ll begin by putting all the cards on the table because the political stakes of the moment are too great for coyness or politesse.1 No matter what those who propound it may believe about themselves...
View ArticleAfropessimism, or Black Studies as a Class Project
Conviction that identifying (actually, often constructing) and addressing racial disparities will improve the general black American population’s material circumstances is rooted in the upward mobility...
View ArticleBayard Rustin: The Panthers Couldn’t Save Us Then Either
Bayard Rustin’s commentary between 1965 and 1975 on race, class, and politics in the U.S. was sharply insightful and can be read profitably for cultivating a nuanced understanding of the crucial period...
View ArticleScapegoating Politics: How Fascism Deploys Race, and How Antiracism Takes the...
In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of...
View ArticleThe Obamas’ “Rustin”: Fun Tricks You Can Do on the Past
When I learned that the Obamas were producing a biopic on Bayard Rustin, I shuddered a bit in apprehension of what such a project would be. Reports from friends who saw it before I did were not...
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