Subjects Archives: Race

  On September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez.”   The report contains biases and inaccuracies, and wrongly purports that human rights guarantees are lacking or not properly enforced in Venezuela.  In addition, while criticizing Venezuela’s human rights in the political context, it fails to mention the […]

In April 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant rights protestors marched in cities across the United States.  They countered prolonged debates about the pros and cons of comprehensive immigration reform with a short but sweet affirmation, scrawled on placards: “No Human Being Is Illegal.”  Their direct assertion challenged the deeply entrenched practices of our government […]

  A historic event worthy of the Guinness Book may have occurred in Washington in the last week of June.  The worst “torture” president that the United States has ever had met the most corrupt and brutal president ever inflicted on the Filipino people.  Grotesque or farcical?  Bush is now credited with the horrendous deaths […]

Narrated by Viggo Mortensen.  Art by Mike Konopacki.  Video editing by Eric Wold.  The video is based on Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008). | | Print

  In a June 9 New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman tells us that “Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago.  It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.”  He attributes this to Bill Clinton, […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

  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, 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 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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  “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 […]

  “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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 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, […]