More than half of Canada’s Black population was born elsewhere, but disproportionate stops by police “can not only end in jail, but deportation and removal,” said Robyn Maynard, a Montreal-based writer and activist and author of “Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.” Canada has been especially harsh in its…
Category: RACISM
Race in Black and White
Alexis L. Boylan Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art. “Matthew Fox-Amato’s Exposing Slavery is a valuable aid for thinking through the tangle of issues around race, sight, power, and bodies.” Review: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in…
US Follows Anti-Black Model in Immigration
The US has criminalized immigrants, just as it has used the criminal justice system to control and oppress African Americans, said Ben Ndugga Kabuye, of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. The crime bills of 1994 and 1996 “criminalized immigration at a level that has never been seen before,” making a host of offenses grounds…
Racial Violence in Black and White
Benjamin Balthaser From photos of lynchers to videos of brutal cops, there is a radical heritage of using images of violence as instruments of critique. “Images of violence have the power not merely to reproduce pain but also to create the society that will work to end it.” Once again cellphone videos showing white police…
Amazon Fires, Bolsonaro’s White Nationalism and Crony Capitalism
Prabir Purkayastha The Right only denies global warming because its climate ‘science’ has ceded before capitalists. The man-made Amazon fires are for clearing the land of its forests and indigenous people. The benefits are for Bolsonaro’s cronies, while producing a climate disaster for the world. The Amazon fires with Brazil at its epicentre have become…
The Great Land Robbery
Vann R. Newkirk II A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. Any conversation about reparations must consider the land. I. Wiped Out “You ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at…
“In the US Prison Industrial Complex, Slavery Can Be Used as Form of Punishment”
Alex Anfruns The 31st july a group of incarcerated people at Scotland Correctional, North Carolina started a hunger strike in order to protest against the use of torture in the correctional facility. In the United States, there are more than 2 million people incarcerated. To know more about the hunger strikers’ conditions, we have interviewed…
Ancient Eugenicists
Zanga Chimombo Ancient Egyptians were not Asians, nor aliens. “Genocide might indeed be a worse demon of our nature.” When black civilisation was destroyed first time round there was little to show for its former glories apart from squat noses and thick lips on statues and other artworks that invading lighter folks successively reduced. After…
Policing the Borders of Suffering
Zoé Samudzi Survivors of the Herero genocide, ca. 1907. Photo: Wikimedia Commons LIKE MANY AMERICANS, my first exposure to the idea of concentration camps came from public school lessons about World War II. But a later, formative influence on my understanding was the stories my mother told me about the Zimbabwean liberation struggle and the…
American Fascism
Deena Stryker The US has now reached the point where the comparison with Nazi Germany has become inescapable, first and foremost the total powerlessness of citizens to challenge the behavior of their government, even when it comes to its treatment of would-be immigrants to the country known as ‘the melting pot’, although they are paying…
Why Anti-Migrant Arguments Are Pure Hypocrisy
Andre Vltchek Almost every day we read about the latest outbursts in Europe, targeting pro-immigration policies. There are protests, even riots. Right-wing governments get voted in, allegedly, because the Europeans “have had enough of relaxed immigration regulations”. That is what we are told. That’s what we are supposed to understand, and even sympathize with. Anti-immigration…
Neither Victims nor Defeated
Ollantay Itzamná Aymara. Bolivia OI. Racism is a socio-political construction with the purpose of nullifying the capacity for emancipatory action of the subalterns. In the same way, indigenous victimism annuls the capacity for resilience and emancipatory political action of the defeated… Indigenous people (be they activists or academics) regularly assume that indigenous people are victims…
