Subjects Archives: Race

  • On the Global Waterfront: Race, Class, and the New Economy

      Join us for a discussion of race, class, and the new economy with E. Paul Durrenberger, coauthor with Suzan Erem of On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5. On the Global Waterfront, new from Monthly Review Press, tells the present-day story of longshoremen in Charleston, South Carolina, who successfully confronted […]

  • NYC Marijuana Possession Arrests Skyrocket, Illustrate NYPD Racial Bias, New Report Shows

      April 29, 2008 — The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade and a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities, according to a report released Tuesday at the New York Civil Liberties […]

  • Playing the Race Card in the 2008 Presidential Election

    It is surely no surprise to readers of MRZine that, in a presidential election race in which an African-American man is not just the front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination, but has a strong chance of winning the White House in November, racism has been front and center.  Four years ago, in his keynote speech […]

  • De Winter: Geert Wilders Is a Bigot

      AMSTERDAM – TV Producer Harry de Winter, President of the board of the foundation Een Ander Joods Geluid [Another Jewish Voice], today placed a remarkable advertisement on the front page of the newspaper Volkskrant.  De Winter puts Geert Wilders‘s criticism of Muslims in the same category as anti-Semitism. See below the de Winter ad […]

  • Barack Obama’s Speech on Race: New Challenges for Him, the Democrats, and Us

    Barack Obama’s speech on race, the greatest speech by a major American political figure in decades, elevates the discussion of race in America to a new level.  What makes this speech so powerful is not only what he said, but also what it requires us to ask and what it demands that we reply.  With […]

  • The Failure of Human Rights Watch in Venezuela and Haiti

    The way Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Haiti and Venezuela in its 2008 World Report reveals an underlying assumption that the U.S. and its allies have the right to overthrow democratic governments.1 The Venezuela section of the report said nothing about ongoing attempts by the U.S. to overthrow the Chavez government.  It is a […]

  • Race, Poverty, and the Neoliberal Agenda in the United States: Lessons from Katrina and Rita

    Abstract The global economic system has come to be dominated de facto by institutions subscribing to and enforcing the neoliberal agenda.  Since the end of World War II, these institutions have sought not only to regulate but, in a manner reminiscent of classical colonialism, to control global resources facilitated by the emergence of the neoliberal […]

  • The South Carolina You Won’t See on CNN

      South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston.  In the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly.  The cops beat the crap out of the protesters.  Of course, it’s the union men who are arrested for conspiracy to riot.  And of course, of […]

  • Ethnic Woes a Legacy of Colonialists’ Power Game

      Kenya appears to be on the brink of an ethnically charged civil war following a disputed election on December 27. President Kibaki was declared the winner of a second term after a vote that opposition candidate Mr Raila Odinga denounces as rigged and that European Union observers agree was seriously flawed. As tens of […]

  • Sticks and Stones

      “O there are times, we must confess To harboring a whim — we Like to picture old Karl Marx Sliding down our chimney” — Susie Day“Help fund the good fight.   By contributing to MR, you help reinforce the left and reclaim the future.” — Richard D. Vogel “To do my part, I just […]

  • Marking Human Rights Day with Demand for Bargaining Rights: UE Calls for Hearing by Inter-American Human Rights Body

      “O there are times, we must confess To harboring a whim — we Like to picture old Karl Marx Sliding down our chimney” — Susie Day“Help fund the good fight.   By contributing to MR, you help reinforce the left and reclaim the future.” — Richard D. Vogel“To do my part, I just got […]

  • Pakistan

      This meeting, after thorough discussion of all aspects of the situation arising from the imposition of State of Emergency by the Chief of the Army Staff, resolves as follows: We strongly condemn the imposition of State of Emergency, promulgation of Provisional Constitution Order (PCO), suspension of fundamental rights and the dismantling of the entire […]

  • Mapping the Human Terrain and Developing Kill Chains:Social Science in Service to Capitalism

    Author’s Note:  The appearance of General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published recently for the US book trade by the University of Chicago Press, has created a stir because of charges of pilfered scholarship, damage to the reputation of UC, and the role of anthropologist Montgomery McFate in writing the book.  The mission of social science […]

  • Racism in Corporate Marketing

    In the last years before his historically catastrophic assassination, Martin Luther King used to lament to his closest comrades that he was “afraid we’re integrating ourselves into a burning house.”  How apt that fear turned out to be is still under-appreciated.  Among the burning rooms that have yet to be discussed is this one: corporate […]

  • The Fairest Cape

      The Curve was a club on Lower Main Road in Observatory, a neighborhood with pretensions of being the home of bohemian Cape Town.  “A strange place,” was how Ntone Edjabe, a DJ whose long sets of Fela-tinged Afrobeat were the highlight on Saturday nights, described The Curve.  What made it unique, according to Ntone, […]

  • Bolivia: Political Racism in Question

      28 August 2007 Bolivia is living through a time of political transition where the verbal masks used prolifically by the television, radio, and press to cover up reality and, as [Uruguayan write Eduardo] Galeano would say, lie in what they say and lie even more in what they don’t say. We live in a […]

  • Two Years Post-Katrina: Racism and Criminal Justice in New Orleans

    Two years after the devastation of New Orleans highlighted racism and inequality in the US, the disaster continues.  New Orleans’ health care and education systems are still in crisis.  Thousands of units of public housing sit empty.  Nearly half the city’s population remains displaced.  A report released this week by the Institute for Southern Studies […]

  • Zionists Attack Mural of Palestinian Resistance

      We are writing to ask for your support for a mural on 24th and Capp St that is under attack by Zionists.  The mural depicts related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression.  Its major theme is breaking down walls — those in Mexico, Palestine, Iraq — […]

  • Human Development and Practice

    Opening comments at Conference on Participation, Change, and Human Development at the Centro Internacional Miranda in Caracas, Venezuela on 27 March 2007 The Bolivarian Constitution, in my view, is unique in its explicit recognition (in Article 299) that the goal of a human society must be that of “ensuring overall human development.”  From the declaration […]

  • Ten Lashes against Humanism [Diez azotes contra el humanismo]

    Una tradición menor del pensamiento conservador es la definición del adversario dialéctico por su falta de moral y por sus deficiencias mentales.  Como esto nunca llega a ser un argumento, se encubre el exabrupto con algún razonamiento fragmentado y repetido, propio del pensamiento posmoderno de la propaganda política.  No es casualidad que en América Latina […]