Skip to content

Black Working Class

Coronavirus And The Crisis Of African American Human Rights

April 24, 2020 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
With the overwhelming evidence that the capitalist system is fundamentally antithetical to the realization of human rights, including what should be an elementary right — access to healthcare — the presidency of Donald J. Trump has been a godsend for the capitalist rulers.  The obsessive focus on Trump the person, his style, his theatrics, the idea that he represents an aberration, an existential threat, allows for the ongoing structural violence embedded in the DNA of racialized capitalism to hide in plain sight.  But for the Black working class and poor it is suicidal to embrace this illusion. Maintaining a clear understanding of our situation, unimpeded by illusions and ideological mystifications, has always been a tool we used to ensure our survival before the ideological swing to the right over the last decade and a half.   

Black Essential Workers Refuse To Be Invisible

April 17, 2020 Monica Moorehead, Workers.org. , , ,
April 14 — Just last week, U.S. bourgeois papers — the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and others — published major articles on the devastating numbers of confirmed infections and deaths of African Americans caused by COVID-19. The articles emphasized the numbers were disproportionate compared to the percentage of African-American people in the U.S. population. And in this tragic way, the virus is helping to publicize on a wider basis the racial inequality that has been the foundation of capitalism in the U.S.   An April 6 WW article, “Racism, COVID-19 and Black people,” pointed to the institutionalized racism — including after the Civil War and the era of “Jim Crow” laws — that has been the underlying cause of suffering by Black people as a nationally oppressed grouping in the U.S.

COVID-19: Killer Of Black, Brown And Poor Of US And Haiti

April 14, 2020 Dady Chery, News Junkie Post. , , ,
We are supposed to be thinking this week about the health disparities in the United States based on race and ethnicity, since the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and even USA Today are going on about it. This is the hot topic presumably because of a recent analysis of the demographics of COVID-19 deaths by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Such an analysis, however, cannot be found. Instead, the public health departments of several US states simultaneously published their COVID-19 racial breakdowns. One cannot help but suspect that this orchestrated and sudden discovery of the institutional racism of the US is nothing but an election-year ploy to sway Black and Hispanic voters from one to another of two political parties that care nothing about them.

Time Of Plague And Meltdown: Mass Murder By Corporate Duopoly

April 2, 2020 Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report. , ,
Tens of thousands of people, disproportionately Black and brown, are marked for death by coronavirus in the coming weeks and months because the United States political system allows only corporate parties to govern. By ensuring that the Dictatorship of Capital is immune to effective electoral challenge, the duopoly system has made the people of the United States less healthy than the rest of the developed world, and far more vulnerable to epidemics of all types. As dutiful servants of Capital, the Democratic and Republican parties have for more than 40 years facilitated a Race to the Bottom (austerity) that has steadily lowered working people’s living standards and slashed social service supports, including the number of hospital beds, which have declined by more than half a million since 1975 despite a population increase of 114 million.

The Legacy Of White Liberals Exploiting The Black Vote

March 18, 2020 By Solomon Comissiong, Blackagendareport.com , ,
On March 3, 2020, former Vice President, Joe Biden, to the euphoric pleasure of Democratic Party elites, was brought back from near political death. After terrible showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden was on the verge of receiving his "last rights" as a corporate politician.

As Biden Racks Up Delegates The Crisis Among Black Folks And Democrat Party Deepens

March 14, 2020 Ajamu Baraka, Blackagendareport.com , ,
Biden wins key state of Michigan and the Democrat Party establishment can barely contain its joy. I am happy also but for a different reason. No matter what happens with this twisted Democrat Party nomination drama, I welcome this period as a period of absolute political clarity. Why? Because for the internal debate and struggles among Black people...

Does This Economy Work For Black Americans?

February 28, 2020 Jamie Buell, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Otherwords.org ,
Unemployment is down for many black Americans, and wages are up -- but the wealth gap remains. It could be easy to miss with the headlines focused on other things, but this February — like every February — was Black History Month. Though it’s a time to celebrate the achievements of black Americans, it’s also a time to look at the challenges facing the community.

Cooperatives For Economic Justice In Black America

February 21, 2020 Staff, Money-morphosis.com , ,
The Freedom Quilting Bee was established in 1967 in Alabama. It is a handicraft cooperative founded by Black women in sharecropping families who needed to supplement their meager incomes, creating and selling exquisite quilts. In 1968, the cooperative bought 23 acres of land on which to build their sewing factory. They provided day care and after-school services for members’ children.

The Housing Crisis Is Intentional And Black Communities Are Fighting Back

January 25, 2020 Maximillian Matthews, Blackyouthproject.com , ,
Horrified and traumatized, Black residents of Durham, NC surveyed the remains of their neighborhoods and businesses following the urban renewal of the late 1960s-early 1970s. The majority of Durham’s Black residents supported urban renewal, after promises of financial assistance, new housing and infrastructure improvements were made by the city government.  Unfortunately, these promises never materialized.

Atlantic Coast Pipeline Loses Permit Battle With Historically Black Community

January 13, 2020 By Rebeccca Beitsch, Thehill.com , , ,
A federal appeals court rejected a needed permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline on Tuesday, the latest legal blow to the controversial pipeline as it heads to the Supreme Court through another case. The unanimous decision from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., was a victory for Union Hill, a community founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. Residents challenged Dominion Energy’s plans to build a gas-powered compressor station for the pipeline in the community, arguing the project would lead to poor health conditions for the largely black community. 

Southern Workers Unite Around Medicare For All

November 24, 2019 Jonathan Michels, In These Times. , , ,
Charlotte, N.C.—A line of cars rolls up to the government center of the largest city in a state tied with neighbor South Carolina for least unionized in the country. Members of the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) emerge from the cars and join a picket line of Charlotte city workers. They hoist a banner declaring “The City Works Because We Do” and chant “What do we want? Medicare for All! When do we want it? Now!” SWA is a coalition of worker committees and labor unions, including National Nurses United (NNU), the International Longshoremen’s Association, and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. Members from across the South converged September 21 to kick off a campaign for the immediate passage of Medicare for All, known in the House as H.R. 1384.

How Black Activists Sought Healthcare Reform: A New Documentary

September 7, 2019 Christopher Willoughby, Aaihs.org , , ,
“The American Medical Association has never been a friend to us [African Americans],” explained the late Chicago physician Dr. Donald L. Chatman. Referring to the history of racial inequality in healthcare, Dr. Chatman revealed the difficulty of forcing the historically white-lead medical establishment in the United States to provide African Americans with equal access to healthcare. A chapter of this history of racial inequality in healthcare and its opposition is the subject of the recent PBS documentary, entitled Power to Heal: Medicare and the Civil Rights Revolution (narrated by activist and actor Danny Glover).

Judge Denies Cancer Alley Marchers’ Request To Cross Louisiana Bridges

June 11, 2019 Staff, Ccrjustice.org , , , ,
May 31, 2019, Baton Rouge, Louisiana – Today, a judge in Louisiana denied an emergency request by community leaders to march across two Mississippi river bridges as part of a five-day march through Cancer Alley. During the hearing, an attorney for the state police said that such marches are against the law and subject to felony charges, citing a law that carries up to 15 years imprisonment. The march, organized by the Coalition Against Death Alley, seeks to bring attention to the poisoning of Black communities in Louisiana’s Mississippi River parishes by hundreds of petrochemical companies.

No Right To Privacy If You’re Poor?

March 13, 2019 Don Lash, Socialistworker.org , ,
Institutional racism places Black women with gross disproportionality in the position of being disenfranchised of privacy rights as poor women, and the moral construction of poverty gives the cover of colorblindness to some manifestations of racism. Nor does Bridges make the claim that poor men have or don’t have privacy rights. She limits her claim to poor women because The Poverty of Privacy Rights is based in large part on research she did in her first book in 2011, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as s Site of Racialization. She makes no claim about poor men simply because she lacks ethnographic data on which to base such claims.

Petrochemical Giants Are Slowly Killing Black Louisiana Communities

March 13, 2019 Mike Ludwig, Truthout.org , ,
Milton Cayette Jr. has just returned from a birthday party at the senior center in Welcome, one of the unincorporated hamlets nestled beside the earthen levee running along the east bank of the Mississippi River in the 5th District of Louisiana’s St. James Parish. Sitting in the kitchen of his home, Cayette begins listing the petrochemical facilities in the area, starting about five miles upriver near the Sunshine Bridge, where a chemical plant run by the company Mosaic produces diammonium phosphate and ammonia. Next door another plant produces styrene, a chemical used to make rubbers and plastics.
«123»