Politics Archives - Page 68 of 109

Activism

The New Abolitionists

And what they can learn from their predecessors

June 11, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

On the same weekend when hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of countless American cities, I saw a yard sign reading “Black Lives Matter!” in Genoa, New York -- which came as a real shock. Genoa is an overwhelmingly Republican town of 1,900 residents, with a tiny black ...

Politics

Is This Regime Change?

The old order has entered a period of decay and illegitimacy

June 10, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Thanks to Donald Trump, white Americans are starting to see the United States through the eyes of black Americans, who experience, every day, police departments deploying an array of Gestapo tactics. Black Americans, in other words, understand fascism intimately. White Americans are finally seeing that the point of Black Lives Matter ...

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

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

Photo Essay: The Side Streets

A walk through Manhattan in June, 2020

June 4, 2020 • by Janet Roitman

Fifth Avenue, June 3, 2020, 3:45 p.m. Shuttered. Sixth Avenue, June 3, 2020. Empty. Sixth Avenue, June 2, 2020, 6:20 p.m. Bare, boarded. June 2, 2020, 6:20 p.m. Side streets. June 2, 2020 6 p.m. Sheltering-in-place. Sixth Avenue, June 2, 6: 25 p.m. Bankrupt. June 3, 2020, 4:50 p.m. A shadow of myself. Janet Roitman is a professor ...

Activism

Wired Politics

Social media is crucial to organizing modern protests: It is also a vulnerability

June 4, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Nowadays, I try not to watch the cable news shows. There are other ways to get information about the demonstrations engulfing the United States, and my neighborhood in Manhattan, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. I text friends in the community for updates ...

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?

Activism

In the Face of Terror

A statement in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd

June 1, 2020 • by Dwight A. McBride

I, like so many others, am both hurt and angered by the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. And as a Black American, this is also deeply personal for me. To be shown repeatedly that we have no guarantee of safety even in the course of ...