Subjects Archives: Race

In the post-Christmas edition of the United Kingdom’s daily socialist newspaper the Morning Star, the editorial commented on the holiday television broadcast of the 1983 film Educating Rita. In it, author Jim Leman pointed out that the 1980s story of a mature working-class hairdresser attempting to enter university, encouraged by a benign academic on tenure, could not happen today. 

It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

In Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism its author, Ashley J. Bohrer, presents a tour de force, offering and contributing to a wide-ranging debate that has occupied left academic and activist audiences for some time now.

George Floyd, who was publicly tortured and lynched by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, narrated his own death, legendary civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump told the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States at its January 25 hearing.

One-time presidential hopeful faces backlash over op-ed saying BDS movement ‘rooted in antisemitic thought and history’.

Leith Mullings, an anthropologist whose work on what she dubbed the Sojourner Syndrome created a baseline understanding of the “weathering” that the amplified stresses of race, class, and inequality have on African Americans, and in particular African American women, died of cancer on December 12.

The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) have assembled a commission of experts from around the world to investigate racist police violence against people of African descent in the United States.

The terms “black radicalism” and “racial capitalism” have become buzzwords in the revitalised international discussion about race that has arisen in parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement since 2013.

Dennis Broe compares and contrasts two images of John Brown in recent TV series. Image above: John Brown at his zaniest, in The Good Lord Bird 

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

President-elect Joe Biden’s recent nomination of Tom Vilsack to serve as the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is causing widespread outrage among food justice activists and Black farmers.

Describing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as socialist and accusing them of fomenting disorder in America’s urban areas invoked racial disorder for the majority white voters who cast their ballots for an avowed white supremacist.

Eighty-three percent of blue-collar temp assignments are staffed by non-white workers in Illinois, a state where non-white workers are just 35 percent of the workforce.

Even when reports of its racism escape this ideological censorship, examples of racism in Israel are treated as isolated incidents, rather than systemic characteristics of the entire racist regime.

This panel will provide an updated reflection on the relationship between Marxism and intersectionality and offer a critical gaze of what intersectionality adds (and possibly subtracts from) contemporary Marxism that is inclusive, enabling and powerful in building political practice.

The discussion on institutional Israeli racism against its own Palestinian Arab population has all but ceased following the final approval of the discriminatory Nation-State Law in July 2018. Indeed, the latest addition to Israel’s Basic Law is a mere start of a new government-espoused agenda that is designed to further marginalize over a fifth of Israel’s population.

Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

Since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis earier this year, we have witnessed the largest mass uprising in the United States’ recent history with millions taking to the streets day in and day out.

Peter Linebaugh interviewed by Johnny Flynn of Independent Left.

Set in our nation’s capital, VOTE is a visual call to arms, highlighting the devastating contradictions that so many in America are experiencing right now, and paying homage to the countless individuals that have sacrificed and are sacrificing so that we may have the right to vote, and have our vote count.