African-Americans

Haitian migrants at the border: An asylum law scholar explains how US skirts its legal and moral duties

By Karen Musalo | – The U.S.’s top envoy to Haiti resigned abruptly on Sept. 22, 2021, over the Biden administration’s “inhumane” treatment of Haitian migrants crossing the border via Mexico into Texas. The resignation came amid debate over the U.S. decision to deport thousands of Haitians entering the U.S. in search of asylum or […]

African-Americans

Southern White Male GOP Voter Suppression, anti-Abortion Laws are ways of reviving Jim Crow and expanding it to White Women

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – African-Americans have complained about the tendency of commentators to compare political suppression and regressive policies of white Republicans to slavery. Nothing, they rightly maintain, is like slavery. But some GOP laws passed by elite white males are very much like Jim Crow-style discrimination. Voter i.d. laws, for instance, are completely […]

African-Americans

The Labor Day Dreams of Black Workers

Inequality.org

By Marc Bayard, Sarah Anderson and Rebekah Entralgo | – As our second pandemic Labor Day approaches, Black worker leaders are determined to never again bear the brunt of a national crisis as they have under Covid-19. At least four U.S. employees have now been killed as they tried to enforce mask mandates — and […]

African-Americans

In the Wake of “Black Lives Matter,” does the the 1919 Chicago Race Riot Take on Special Significance?

Michael Slager

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – This week marks another infamous anniversary in US history: the Chicago race riot of 1919. It started when white beachgoers threw rocks at Eugene Williams, a black teenager. He had drifted on a homemade raft from his neighborhood beach toward a white section of it, where a group pelted […]

African-Americans

We Can Have the Filibuster or Democracy, But Not Both

Peter Certo

By Peter Certo | ( Otherwords.org) – The American political system is complicated, but fixing it doesn’t have to be. Voters of all stripes broadly agree on the kinds of changes they’d like to see. We need less money in politics. It should be easier to vote — early, in person, or by mail. And […]

African-Americans

What the Supreme Court ruling on Arizona Law means for your Right to Vote

The Conversation

By Cornell William Clayton and Michael Ritter | – Arizona may keep two voting laws that Republicans say protect election integrity and Democrats believe will make it harder for some residents to cast ballots. That’s the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, one of the decade’s most important voting rights […]

African-Americans

If we truly honored Juneteenth, we would end the exception in the 13th amendment

Waging Nonviolence

By Emma Jordan-Simpson | – (Waging Nonviolence ) – In my inbox this morning from a major nonprofit organization that should have known better was a Juneteenth celebratory greeting: “We proudly celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery finally came to an end throughout the South — historically a monumental feat for American history and now a […]

African-Americans

Top US Officer Gen. Milley Schools GOP Reps. on Critical Race Theory, Need for Military to Study Society: “I Have Read Marx and Lenin”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Republicans in Congress really miss the days of red baiting and the Communist threat. Dick Nixon made his bones running against leftist labor unions, intimating to then-conservative San Francisco burghers that insurrectionary Communists were hiding under their beds. The party won elections by making people afraid of workers, of […]

African-Americans

When You Lift from the Bottom, Everyone Rises: Have We Entered America’s Third Era of Reconstruction?

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com) – West Virginia, a state first established in defiance of slavery, has recently become ground zero in the fight for voting rights. In an early June op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin vowed to maintain the Senate filibuster, while opposing the For the People Act, a bill to expand voting […]