Robin D.G. Kelley - Mike Brown's Body: A Meditation on War, Race, & Democracy

Black Study, Black Struggle

Robin D.G. Kelley, The Boston Review

In the fall of 2015, college campuses were engulfed by fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This is not to say that college students had until then been quiet in the face of police violence against black Americans. Throughout the previous year, it had often been college students who hit the streets, blocked traffic, occupied the halls of justice and malls of America, disrupted political campaign rallies, and risked arrest to protest the torture and suffocation of Eric Garner, the abuse and death of Sandra Bland, the executions of Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott, Tony Robinson, Freddie Gray, ad infinitum.

That the fire this time spread from the town to the campus is consistent with historical patterns. The campus revolts of the 1960s, for example, followed the Harlem and Watts rebellions, the freedom movement in the South, and the rise of militant organizations in the cities. But the size, speed, intensity, and character of recent student uprisings caught much of the country off guard. Protests against campus racism and the ethics of universities’ financial entanglements erupted on nearly ninety campuses, including Brandeis, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Claremont McKenna, Smith, Amherst, UCLA, Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of North Carolina, both Chapel Hill and Greensboro. These demonstrations were led largely by black students, as well as coalitions made up of students of color, queer folks, undocumented immigrants, and allied whites.

Conflict can destroy movements. We need to fight the system, not each other

Erica Garner & Kemi Alabi, The Guardian 

On 17 July 2014, New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo killed my father, Eric Garner. More than 11 minutes of video footage show Officer Pantaleo placing him in an illegal chokehold, and people all over the world soon learned my father’s final words: “I can’t breathe”. Faced with yet another incontrovertible act of police brutality, angered viewers formed resistance groups – practically overnight – to demand justice.

The Hijacking of Fergu$on

T-Dubb-O, UrbanCusp

The Ferguson uprising started the development of a revolution here in the United States. There is no question that Ferguson was much different and more radical than anything we’ve seen here in this country. A movement filled with young, black, oppressed, and fearless males and females who were unapologetic on their conquest for freedom. St. Louis, MO opened the door for factual conversations around racism and oppression in this country. The entire world watched and supported Ferguson, but that support did not reach the people of St. Louis, MO.

Killing Haitian Democracy

Robert Fatton Jr, The Jacobin

On July 28, 1915 the United States invaded Haiti, and imposed its diktat on the nation for close to two decades. The immediate pretext for the military intervention was the country’s chronic political instability that had culminated in the overthrow, mob killing, and bloody dismemberment of President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.

The American takeover was in tune with the Monroe Doctrine, first declared in 1823, that justified the United States presumption that it had the unilateral right to interfere in the domestic affairs of Latin America. But it was not until the late 1800s when America had become a major world capitalist power that it actually acquired the capacity to fulfill its extra-continental imperial ambitions. In 1898 it seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam and soon afterwards took control of the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

Racial terror from Columbus to Charleston

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

Since the 1920s, Charleston has been the name of a dance, a dance with roots in Africa, made white and famous on Broadway. Now Charleston is the name of a massacre, the murder of nine people and the desecration of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 when Charles II of England granted land in Carolina to some of his supporters after he was restored to the throne. The city and its putative Southern gentility were built on two great historical crimes – the genocide of the indigenous American people and the African slave trade.

Winter in America

Slavery and Capitalism

Sven Beckert, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Few topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the discussion has spanned political boundaries, with conservative newspapers in Britain and Germany running stories on the "future of capitalism" (as if that were in doubt) and Korean Marxists analyzing its allegedly self-destructive tendencies. Pope Francis has made capitalism a central theme of his papacy, while the French economist Thomas Piketty attained rock-star status with a 700-page book full of tables and statistics and the succinct but decisively unsexy title Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press).

A Closer Look at the American Flag

From Michael Brown to Assata Shakur, the racist state of America persists

Angela Davis, The Guardian

Although racist state violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the administration of the first African-American president, whose very election was widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era.

The Untold History of Independence Day