Subjects Archives: Race

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Thursday, October 19 Que(e)rying Islamophobia: Race, Sexuality and Imperialism Reza Abbasi, “Two Lovers” (ca. 1630) Discourses of race, gender and sexuality have always served an important ideological function within imperialist projects, and the current phase of American imperialism, characterized by the War on Terror, is no exception.  Given the contemporary geo-political context, this imperialist project […]

WE ARE NOT WHAT WE SEEM: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century by Roderick D. BushBUY THIS BOOK Roderick Bush is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at St. John’s University in New York.  He is the author of We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in […]

Racism against Arabs and Muslims long preceded the 9-11 terrorist attacks and has much of its roots in Western imperialism in the Middle East, especially Israel’s colonization of Palestine.  Yet, the escalation that we witness today can be traced to the war on terror launched after 9-11 by Bush and his neoconservative ideologues with the […]

It was Jay Gould who once bragged that he could pay half the working class to kill the other half.  In American labor history, that often meant fomenting and exploiting racism to divide and conquer.  Apparently, CBS wants to give us a TV metaphor for it: it announced that the contestants on the upcoming season […]

With the exception of a couple years here and there, I grew up in Germany and attended German schools until I was 19 years old.  History teachers at the time were obsessed with helping our generation grapple with the questions: how could the Germans have let it happen?  How did so many get roped in […]

  Like many millions of fans of “Les Bleus,” France’s multi-ethnic football team, I was stunned and dismayed by the strange denouement of last Sunday’s World Cup final.  Our hero Zinedine Zidane, the greatest player of his generation and an exemplary figure in many ways, was ejected from the game with ten minutes to go […]

  Working people like to gamble.  It adds excitement to life and allows us to dream that we might be able to live without working at jobs we detest.  As a boy, I played poker, shot nine-ball, pot bowled, bet the ponies, and even hit the bingo tables once.  “Hap,” the man who ran the […]

  My father’s travels ended in 1980. We came back to live the Iran-Iraq war. Zinnah, my sister, was a child of ten when she attended the Dijla (Tigress) Primary School. One day she returned to ask my mother, “Are we Sunni or Shooyouii (Arabic for Communist)?” a word she had most probably picked up […]

Even before Iran was rocked by the mass uprising of 1978-79, I understood that moralists of all stripes shroud certain tragedies with unique reverence as a means of discouraging dissent.  Three decades later, Iran’s opposition movement — and occasionally Human Rights Watch — are grounded in orthodoxies of their own even as they struggles against […]

It’s as if the spotlight that Hurricane Katrina cast on the inequities of disaster relief never happened. San Francisco’s high and mighty are in full-throated self-celebration of the City’s “rising from the ashes” of the April 18, 1906 earthquake and fire. Forgotten are people like my great-great grandfather Lee Bo-wen who immigrated to San Francisco […]

  Yiwen Cheng lives in Kansas City, and Stephen Philion lives in Minneapolis.

  Click on an image to watch a slide show of the immigrant rights march in Milwaukee on 23 March 2006. SOURCE: Kristyna Wentz-Graff, “A Day without Latinos,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 March 2006 March 23, 2006 was a historic day for Milwaukee.  It was a day of Latinos in a city that still thinks […]

I’ve just about had it.  I cannot watch one more episode of the Daily Show which makes racist jokes about Arabs and Muslims.  I am sick and tired of people who see themselves as part of the left writing articles that put a liberal gloss over what is, in essence, a right-wing “clash of civilizations” […]

  Caracas, Venezuela — Under the elevated lines in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union has been waging a battle against poverty that has taken them to center stage of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.  Led by Cheri Honkala, a formerly homeless mother, the KWRU began by building encampments […]

Click on the image for a larger view. Chicago, 2005 In the middle of a blizzard in Chicago on December 8, 2005, I stood with about 250-300 union members and supporters at the Haymarket Memorial, chanting, “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights.”  This was one of a number of rallies around the country that the AFL-CIO […]

The protest against the Nazis in Toledo on October 15, 2005 was an appropriate response to the violent racism that the Nazi party represents. Wherever racist groups like the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan go, they need to be exposed for what they are, not ignored. Sure, they may be (willing) pawns in a […]

  Watch the Black Lantern‘s video of “George Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People” by the Legendary K.O.:

  [Peter Berkowitz is a long-time Monthly Review subscriber. He was in New Orleans bringing his son Ernesto to begin his freshman year at Loyola when they were caught in the hurricane. Peter and Ernesto spent five days on the street by the Convention Center. Below is a letter Peter sent to his mother upon […]

A national alliance of black community leaders will announce the formation of a New Orleans People’s Committee to demand a decision-making role in the short-term care of hurricane survivors and long-term rebuilding of New Orleans. Community Labor United (CLU), a New Orleans coalition of labor and community activists, has put out a call to activists […]