Race

A People’s Anthology: Episode Five

The Combahee River Collective Statement.

A People’s Anthology: Episode Three

“The Black Revolution: A Struggle for Political Power” by Jesse Gray. 

A People’s Anthology: Episode Four

“Power Anywhere There’s People” by Fred Hampton.

A People’s Anthology: Episode Two

“The July Rebellions and the ‘Military State’” by Jack O’Dell. 

A People’s Anthology

A podcast reading series of radical essays and speeches from U.S. history.

Immigration Enforcement and the Afterlife of the Slave Ship

Coast Guard techniques for blocking Haitian asylum seekers have their roots in the slave trade. Understanding these connections can help us disentangle immigration policy from white nationalism.

“White Fragility” Gets Jackie Robinson’s Story Wrong

Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling book sells a misguided view of baseball integration to her readers and corporate clients.

DNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors

Home DNA ancestry kits include no ancestors, instead comparing customers to other present-day people based on assumptions about race and ethnicity. So what are they actually selling?

Poisoning Tallevast

First, segregation blocked this Florida community from equal education and other public goods. Then the military–industrial complex sickened residents and destroyed their property.

Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race

As more of Robinson’s books come back into print, reading them with Black Marxism can enrich our understanding of racial capitalism.

Why Black Marxism, Why Now?

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism helps us fight fascism with greater clarity and with ever more questions.

The Logic of Eugenics Still Haunts Virginia

Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future—and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons.

Whiteness Is the Greatest Racial Fraud

The Krugs and Dolezals dominate the headlines, but they are distractions from the fraud that imperils us all: believing oneself to be white.

The Fight Ahead

The Republican Party has become a white nationalist party. If old-fashioned politics can’t change that, we must consider alternatives.

Caste Does Not Explain Race

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

Racism and Respiration

COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities is just one of many respiratory inequities shaped by systemic racism.

Why We Shouldn’t Compare Transracial to Transgender Identity

Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.

I Don’t Have to Forgive Joe Biden

We should condemn the president-elect’s record on race, but that does not foreclose hope for his administration.

Births of a Nation, Redux

If we’d paid attention, we wouldn’t have expected a Biden landslide.

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

A debate is roiling about the aptness of comparing Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

The Politics of White Anxiety

Trump is only the latest to exploit it. A new path forward must address the structures that sustain it.

Toward a Global History of White Supremacy

The simultaneous success of Trump and Brexit was no coincidence.

Getting to Freedom City

A culture of protest takes hold in 1960s LA.

Is Freedom White?

Talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

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