Ethnicities

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

( 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 […]

African-Americans

Jim Crow was Never Dead, but the Black Church can Lead the Way in Banishing Voter Suppression

OtherWords

By Rev. Susan K. Smith and Rev. Levon C. Manzie | ( Otherwords.org) – We suspected it for years, and now we know it: Jim Crow was never dead. You might even say he was too mean to die. We know this because in too many places, the forces of racism are raging as laws […]

Immigration

Central American Migrants: They’re Here Because We Were There

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Democrats claim to defend an honest rendition of US history, one that will be attentive to the injustices inflicted by slavery and racism. Unfortunately, however, that honesty stops at the water’s edge. While the president prepared for and conducted a widely- covered summit that among other things […]

Asian-Americans

Japanese American soldiers in World War II fought the Axis for the U.S. abroad and racial prejudice back at home

The Conversation

By Susan H. Kamei | – Imagine being forced from your home by the government, being imprisoned in a detention camp under armed guards and behind barbed wire – and then being required to join the military to fight for the nation that had locked up you and your family. That’s what happened in a […]

African-Americans

100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, lessons from my grandfather

The Conversation

By Gregory B. Fairchild | – When Viola Fletcher, 107, appeared before Congress in May 2021, she called for the nation to officially acknowledge the Tulsa race riot of 1921. I know that place and year well. As is the case with Fletcher – who is one of the last living survivors of the massacre, […]

African-Americans

A Year Later: Are Palestinians like George Floyd?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – May 26 was the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police, and President Biden had the victim’s family to the White House, where they lobbied the president on police reform. George Floyd could not have imagined how he would become an international symbol of the victimization […]

Arab Americans

Yemeni people are being starved — so this Detroit organizer went on hunger strike in solidarity

Waging Nonviolence

By Loretta Graceffo | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – During the early days of the war, when Iman Saleh called her family in Yemen, they would lie to reassure her they were safe. “They would always say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s happening far from us,’” Saleh said. “It felt like I was becoming a burden to […]

African-Americans

Amid Chauvin trial and more police killings, we need to stress Boycotts and the ‘Noncooperation’ in ‘Nonviolent Noncooperation’

Waging Nonviolence

By Maria J. Stephan | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – In his March 1956 sermon “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious,” Martin Luther King, Jr. responded to a headline in a local Alabama newspaper that read, “Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama.” The headline was referring […]

African-Americans

Systemic Racism won’t End with One Trial, But Biden-Harris can enlist Government in addressing Economic Inequality at its Root

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – African-Americans face aggressive policing in part because, on average, they lack resources. Household wealth allows a family to donate to political campaigns, to ensure a good education for their children, and to join influential civic clubs and organizations. The Center for American Progress reports that in 2019, before the distortions […]