4 March 2020 — Black Agenda Report

Fear Pervades Black Politics, and Makes Us Agents of Our Own Oppression

Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
Many Black voters recoiled in abject terror at the very thought that the Democratic Party – “our” party, in many Black folks’ minds – might fracture under the challenge of the Sandernistas.

Freedom Rider: U.S. Continues Its War on the Rest of the World

Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
The duopoly corporate parties enforce silence and ignorance on foreign policy to ensure that Americans have neither the knowledge nor the tools to resist their country’s policy of endless war.

Why it is Unlikely Sandernistas Will Catch Russiagate Fever and Why He Should Be Held Accountable Anyway

Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
Bernie Sanders’ rise to frontrunner status has done nothing to challenge the endless wars waged by the US, yet he is sure to face more smears and attacks the more his campaign succeeds.

California Flags Alienated, Idealistic Kids of Color as Potential Violent Extremists

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The program deputizes teachers to spy on students and recruits social service agencies to assemble dossiers on them while providing mental health services

.Ask your doctor if Klobuchar is Right for you

Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
“Klobuchar may cause
Serious side effects
including dry mouth, blindness,
deafness, recurring nightmares”

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Smacks Abu-Jamal Again

Linn Washington Jr
The Justices used extraordinary authority to delay Mumia’s appeal of his murder conviction.

Teaching Theory, Talking Community

Joy James
For centuries, Indigenous and African peoples in the Americas have theorized for their lives and so collectively crafted a revolutionary praxis.

Letters from Our Readers

Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
This week you had Joe Biden’s electability, Russiagate, and the challenges of building a new peace movement on your minds.

BAR Book Forum: Joshua Myers’s “We Are Worth Fighting For”

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
The students imagined a new kind of university and a radical transformation of the world.

BAR Book Forum: Elizabeth Foster’s book, “African Catholic”

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
The decolonization of Africa, and the determined activism of prominent African Catholics, played an important role in diversifying the church.

Black Scholar Praises Heroes and Indicts “Scoundrels” of McCarthy Era

Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
The peace activists that were persecuted in the McCarthy era were not fighting just for the absence of war, but were “anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and demanded an end to United States policing of the world,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, professor of Africana Studies and political science at Carleton College. The exemplars of this struggle were W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones, “Peace was construed as a Soviet ploy to undermine the American way of life,” said Burden-Stelly. Sound familiar?

“Respectable” Black Women Fought Mass Incarceration

Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Back in the days when 90 percent of southern prison inmates were Black, socially conservative Black clubwomen fought for prison reform, believing that “putting Black women in jail was hurting the Black community,” said Nikki Brown, professor of history at the University of New Orleans. The National Association of Colored Women, who practiced what we today call “respectability” politics, played a key role in creating alternatives to incarceration, said Brown, who authored an article titled, “Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman-Saving in the Progressive Era.”

If the Left Doesn’t Critique Endless War, Who Will?

Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
“We must raise the issues of war and imperialism in electoral politics in this country,” even if the Democrats don’t, said BAR senior columnist Margaret Kimberley, speaking at the annual conference of UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “In the debates, foreign policy is discussed very little, and when it is they all sound the same, even those who are supposed to be progressive,” said Kimberley.

Former UN Rapporteur on Human Rights: US Sanctions Have Killed More Than 100 Thousand Venezuelans

Orinoco Tribune
Catastrophic death and massive emigration are due to Washington’s financial suffocation and blockade of the socialist-governed country.

Lawyers for the Left: A Review

Flint Taylor
This lawyers’ story inspires us to march forward against the forces of repression, oppression, and white supremacy.”

Message to the US Corporate Media: Capitalism is Responsible for the Deaths of Millions of People

Solomon Comissiong
Corporate media snake-oil salesmen/women are doing their best to convince the masses that socialism is the devil itself.

The Gift of India and the Violence of the West

R. Divya Nair
Five centuries ago, Europeans set about subjugating the non-“white” peoples of the world, and they are still at it.

The Difference Between Yams and Sweet Potatoes Is Structural Racism

Margaret Eby
The confusion goes all the way back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Last Surviving Member of the Move 9 is Released

Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Delbert Africa, imprisoned along with eight other members of the Move organization in 1978 in the death of a Philadelphia policeman, is finally free to “tell his story,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, who was convicted in the death of another Philadelphia cop in 1981. Abu Jamal recounted how a Black city councilman described Delbert Africa as “one of the greatest Black men that ever lived.” Two Move members died mysteriously in prison.