The New Dark Age

4 February 2021 — Black Agenda Report

Nightmare Years Will Repeat Themselves – Until the People Kick Out the Cabal 

Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
To take on the corporate imperial racial capitalist state, we need a Black-led movement that puts politics in command and names the Democratic perpetrators and collaborators that are culpable in the unfolding, late-stage capitalist disaster.

Freedom Rider: The Never Ending COVID Crisis 

Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Profits determine the US response to a health care crisis, so Americans are in trouble regardless of who occupies the White House.

Joe Biden is a White Supremacist War Hawk, Too 

Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
No one in the Biden camp has spoken out against the past, present, and future war crimes which will undoubtedly shape the administration.

MANIFESTO: Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, August, 1920 

Editors, The Black Agenda Review
As part of our mission to supplement BAR’s historical perspective, the Black Agenda Review examines the Harlem meeting and manifesto that shook the Black world, a century ago.

Creeping Corporate Statism, aka Fascism 

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Despite depending on separate news media that purvey different realities, the two corporate parties both serve a corporate dictatorship.

Conspiracy theory 47 

Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
It wasn’t led by lineage of Robert E. Lee— it was nuts demanding healthcare for free! It wasn’t a lynch mob, a putsch, or a coup—

Reaching Beyond “Black Faces in High Places”: An Interview With Joy James 

George Yancy
White supremacist culture is a permanent site of predatory consumption, extraction and violation.

Letters from Our Readers 

Jahan Choudhry, BAR Comments Editor
The federal government’s stimulus payments and the role of black police officers were on your minds.

BAR Book Forum: Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy’s “Histories of Racial Capitalism” 

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
Racial capitalism is insidious and malleable, and can adapt to nearly any political context.

BAR Book Forum: Short Meditations on Christina Sharpe’s “In the Wake” 

Jade Bentil
To read In the Wake  is to read a love letter to Black people in the everywhere of this world.

The American Way of Fascism 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
In an essay for Prison Radio, Mumia Abu Jamal cited journalist Chris Hedges’ contention that “the Christian Right is always “ready to support repressive measures against all who do not embrace their movement.” American fascism has distinctly Christian characteristics, according to the nation’s best known political prisoner.

US Militarists Invent Enemies – and Russiagate — for Dollars 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Russiagate is a fiction concocted by Democrats and intelligence agencies explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat and fuel a New Cold War, said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst. “You can’t spend $740 billion a year if you don’t have a plausible enemy, like Russia and now China,” McGovern told Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, of The Gray Zone. McGovern is active with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Billionaire Wealth Breaks All Records in Crisis 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
The US billionaire class has grown at unprecedented speed during the pandemic and economic crises, increasing their wealth by over a trillion dollars and adding 46 new oligarchs to their numbers, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. Never has the world seen wealth accumulation at such a scale, said Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the study. “We need to create an economic system that does not allow for wealth tobe extremely concentrated,” said Ocampo. “ This could be done by “growing the labor movement” and instituting “workplace democracy and worker ownership.”

The Left Lens: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and American Empire, with Ajamu Baraka

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is often celebrated without any regard for his radical political legacy. Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka joins Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley to assess the ongoing relevance of MLK’s work and worldview.

Building Solidarity  

Renée Feltz
Mutual aid tends to expose the reality that people lack what they need, while also creating spaces to meet those needs and build a shared analysis.

Book Review: The Prologue, The Prototype, The O.G. Hater 

Todd Steven Burroughs
Hubert Henry Harrison was a Black intellectual inferno, a warrior in the cause of a race- and class-based politics.

Beyond Slogans: Palestinians Need an Urgent, Centralized Strategy to Counter Israel in Africa 

Ramzy Baroud
Israel has accelerated its plans to exploit Africa’s many political and economic opportunities, especially as the continent is now an open ground for renewed global attention.

The Veiled Violence of Racism 

Dr. Kweli Nzito
The struggle against white supremacy dares to undermine a way of life that has steered and informed White American and European imperialism for 500 years.

Anti-Black Racism Is Environmental Hazard 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Environmental justice should be put at the cutting edge of the social justice movement, said Dr Ugo Edu, an African American Studies professor at UCLA, and a medical anthropologist who has done field work in Brazil. “If the police are stopping you arbitrarily, we should talk about that as creating an unsafe environment,” said Edu. “The kind of anxiety, the kind of vigilance that is necessary to ive in” such an environment “doesn’t bode well in terms of your health.”

Abolish Police, from the US to Nigeria 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Crystal, a first-generation US citizen of Nigerian descent and activist with the Assata Collective, supports the abolition of police in both countries. “The call for abolition is very adamant from the Nigerian youth,’ who have launched a mass movement against police brutality and corruption, said Crystal, a college nursing graduate.