Essays

Politics

Is This Regime Change?

The old order has entered a period of decay and illegitimacy

June 10, 2020 • by
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 ...
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Is This Regime Change?
Feature

How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence

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

June 9, 2020 • by

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 ...

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How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence
Activism

The “Buffalo Protestor”

On Martin Gugino, friend and fellow activist

June 9, 2020 • by
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 ...
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The “Buffalo Protestor”
Politics

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

Why effective anti-racism demands reflexivity

June 8, 2020 • by
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 ...
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If Everyone Else Is the Problem, You Probably Aren’t Seeing Things Clearly
Capitalism

Tesla’s Latest Rip-Off

June 8, 2020 • by
That’s how one resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma, reacted to the city repainting a seventy-five-foot statue of an oil driller, erected in 1966, to look like Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Tulsa is reportedly on the short list—along with Austin, Texas—for a new Tesla Cybertruck factory, so local leaders are pulling out ...
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Tesla’s Latest Rip-Off
From the Editors

#BlackLivesMatter

Like Killer Mike, we don’t want to be here — but we are. And we embrace it.

June 4, 2020 • by
Instead, we are shocked by how quickly the protest networks that have mobilized in response to George Floyd’s murder have won our hearts, and how completely they have compelled us to act. It caused us to pull together a second special issue in a row quickly. We begin with an address by ...
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#BlackLivesMatter
Activism

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by
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 ...
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Enough Is Enough
Activism

An American Reckoning

The fire this time

June 4, 2020 • by
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 ...
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An American Reckoning
Activism

Photo Essay: The Side Streets

A walk through Manhattan in June, 2020

June 4, 2020 • by
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 ...
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Activism

Wired Politics

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

June 4, 2020 • by
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 ...
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Wired Politics
Activism

What Is to Be Done?

Three scholars of democracy respond to the protests

June 4, 2020 • by , and
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 ...
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What Is to Be Done?

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