In the 1850s, Midwestern states used harsh laws to deny free African-Americans wealth and property. By Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research. Sept. 20, 2019, NYTimes.com William Brown managed to get across the river safely, finding work in a small rural Illinois community close to the state’s border with Indiana. He would have known …
The Illegal Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government
By Keanu Sai, PhD, NEA Today.August 31, 2019 | EDUCATE! NOTE: This is the first of three articles we are publishing by Dr. Keanu Sai, a member of the Hawaiian Kingdom Subcommittee of the National Lawyers Guild. The articles were written to provide accurate information to Hawaiian (and other) students about Hawaiian history. Status Of The Hawaiian Kingdom Under International Law In 2001, …
From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the shape of cities has been defined by the technologies that allow commuters to get to work in about 30 minutes
JONATHAN ENGLISH, AUG 29, 2019, City Lab In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day. This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land …
‘Prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order’
Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting. According to a new …
Do not underestimate the destructive power of lies and do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse as ours did
Many who were older and wiser than me at that time also shared my childlike state. If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you. You will see what it is like to live in a society where morality has collapsed, causing all your assumptions and prejudices to crumble before your …
What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.
By Kevin M. Kruse, NYTimes, Aug 14, 2019 Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States. Drivers there average two hours each week mired in gridlock, hung up at countless spots, from the constantly clogged Georgia 400 to a complicated cluster of overpasses at Tom Moreland Interchange, better known as “Spaghetti Junction.” The Downtown Connector — a 12-to-14-lane …
1619: Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in Virginia. Enslaved labor created the backbone for America’s capitalistic economy
Although slavery officially ended in 1865, the unequal treatment of African Americans continued through Jim Crow, red lining, and mass incarceration, among many public policies. Our country’s historic racial wealth disparities continue to be perpetuated and increased by the trend towards extreme inequality in the United States. To further paint a dire picture, a report released earlier this year by the Institute …
Nazi scholars, lawyers, and officials were heavily influenced by United States law when they were developing policies and laws concerning Jewish people
“In a 1928 speech, Hitler stated that Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage …” Other scholars agree that for ‘generations of German imperialists, and for Hitler himself, the exemplary land empire was the United States of America.’ by Robert J. Miller, Indian …
The climate crisis is the only truly global climate shift during the last two millennia: previous anomalies were regional
“It’s true that during the Little Ice Age it was generally colder across the whole world,” research team leader Raphael Neukom of the Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern said, “but not everywhere at the same time. The peak periods of pre-industrial warm and cold periods occurred at different times in different places.” For example, …
The Joy of Hatred
NTimes, 7/19/19 W.E.B. Dubois said: “While Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system,” he argued, “the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” It is white labor, he continued, that “deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies …