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Racism

Racism And Health Toolkit

Here are the materials you need to give a presentation to your organization or group on racism and health and why we need a national improved Medicare for all healthcare system. This is meant to inform and stimulate discussion about this topic.

The Long Shadow Of Racial Fascism

In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response —has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. Gordon , Samuel Moyn , and Sarah Churchwell  taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist.

Kentucky Police Training Slideshow Quoted Hitler

A training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police (KSP) — the second largest police force in the state — urges cadets to be “ruthless killer[s]” and quotes Adolf Hitler advocating violence. The slideshow was included in KSP documents obtained via an open records request by local attorney David Ward of Adams Landenwich Walton during the discovery phase of a lawsuit. Ward requested KSP materials used to train a detective who shot and killed a man in Harlan County, and Ward shared the presentation with Manual RedEye. 

We Need To Build A Movement That Heals Our Nation’s Traumas

As we head into what may be the most chaotic election in our lifetime, many people on all sides of the political aisle are reeling from anxiety and responding from a place of panic. With many of us on the left organizing for mass mobilizations and actions in the post-election season, we must make sure that we are doing so from a grounded place to ensure that we are not adding more panic to the world. To ensure this, we have to have some understanding of how panic and trauma work in our own bodies, and then see what we can learn from that about how trauma is working in our collective body...

The Magical Thinking Of Reformism

Reform is best understood as a logic rather than an outcome: an approach to institutional change that sustains existing social, economic, political, and/or legal systems, including but not limited to policing, two-party electoral politics, heteronormativity, criminal justice, and corporate destruction of the natural world. To reform a system is to adjust isolated aspects of its operation in order to protect that system from total collapse, whether by internal or external forces. Such adjustments usually rest on the fundamental assumption that these systems must remain intact...

Say Racism’s Name, And Fight It With Solidarity

The instability of Trump’s presidency and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement have upset the U.S. power structure. White supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Movement have increased in number and visibility to protect the right of white America to the historic spoils of stolen land and stolen labor. These groups have found their Great White Hope in Donald Trump and his many appeals to keep them safe from Black Americans, immigrants, and oppressed nations all over the world.

Massive Rally In Support Of Sipekne’katik Harvesters, Treaty Rights

Halifax, Nova Scotia - About a thousand people gathered in Grand Parade on Sunday, singing, drumming and voicing their support for Indigenous harvesters on Nova Scotia’s southwestern shore, who are exercising their right to fish — outside the commercial season. It’s an assertion of treaty, constitution and court-protected rights that has cost Sipekne’katik fishers dearly since their launch of a moderate livelihood fishery in mid-September. This week, they were the target of assault, arson, vandalism, threats and intimidation.

Lobster Pound Used By Mi’kmaw Destroyed By Fire

Nova Scotia, Canada - Early this morning, a fire destroyed a lobster pound (building/facility) used by Mi’kmaw fishers in the fishing village of Middle West Pubnico, Nova Scotia. Global News reports: “The lobster pound is the same one that was swarmed, vandalized and ransacked by a large crowd of non-Indigenous commercial fishers and their supporters Tuesday night.” That article notes that Mi’kmaw fisher Jason Marr said that non-Indigenous fishers had threatened on Tuesday night to “burn” his group out of the building if they didn’t leave and allow them to take the lobsters they had caught.

Report Finds ‘Gang Like’ Police Clique That Exerts ‘Undue Influence’

Los Angeles County’s top watchdog said Monday that substantial evidence exists that a secretive group of tattooed deputies at the East L.A. sheriff’s station are “gang-like and their influence has resulted in favoritism, sexism, racism and violence.” In a 32-page report probing activities of the Banditos clique, Inspector General Max Huntsman alleged that Sheriff Alex Villanueva “continues to promote a code of silence regarding these sub-groups” which have plagued the agency for decades.

California Schools Launch Anti-Racism Plan

Sacramento, CA - The California Department of Education announced new anti-racism lessons and teacher training for school districts on Monday, days after President Donald Trump decried the notion of teaching slavery as a founding tenet of the U.S. and called for a more “patriotic education." Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond pointed to the police killing of George Floyd in May, bullying of Asian American students amid the coronavirus and a spike in anti-immigrant rhetoric and antisemitism since the 2016 election as reasons for the project.

Modern US Racial Capitalism

In recent years, “racial capitalism” has ascended across the humanities and social sciences. It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war.1 This increased interest, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in nature, is conveyed in the myriad race and capitalism debates...

Sinophobia Inc: Understanding The Anti-China Industrial Complex

The United States’ alliance is barreling towards conflict with China. In recent months, the U.S. government has taken unprecedented steps to upend normal relations with China: sanctioning Communist Party of China officials, banning Chinese tech companies like TikTok and Huawei, interrogating and surveilling Chinese students and scientists, and even forcing the Houston Chinese consulate to close. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls it an end to “blind engagement” with a Chinese state he labels an existential threat to the “free world.”

Labor Must Make Defense Of Black Lives Its Own Imperative

Black trade unionists across the U.S. are calling on the labor movement to defend Black Lives Matter protesters and to fight racism in their own ranks. The attacks by police and increasingly violent armed racist militias evoke the memory of many such violent incidents against Black people in earlier periods, from slavery to segregation to the civil rights era. For Labor Day 2020, Truthout reached out to Christopher Silvera, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 808 in Long Island City, NY; Elise Bryant, executive director of Labor Heritage Foundation and president of the Communication Workers of America’s Coalition...

‘When You Talk About White Supremacy, You’ve Got To Take A Hard Look At Our Culture’

We are in troubling times, listeners know, with people being attacked for simply saying that Black Lives Matter and a president encouraging those attacks. It’s what many feared when Trump came into office. But at the same time, we acknowledge that Trump didn’t create the phenomenon of white supremacist violence. There’s a whole history there that media should be using to shape their recording of present day events, give them context–and hopefully put an end to the “troubled individual” trope to describe people who are, in fact, part of something larger. CounterSpin talked about this in June of 2017 with Heidi Beirich, who leads the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It’s Time For The West To Sit Down, Shut Up And Listen To ‘The Others’

We were always told what to think; what is correct and what is wrong. By the white dudes living in or coming from Europe and North America. They knew everything. They were the most qualified. When I write “white,” I don’t mean just their race or color of their skin. To me, “white” is their culture, where they belong. Yes, their identity. We Russians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, Iranians, Turks are not really “white,” even if our color of the skin is. Not that we are dying to be white, really! We have our own way of living and thinking, and most of us are on the side of the oppressed, of the ‘wretched of the world,’ intuitively.