Reparations and Anti-Police Torture Demands Produced Results in Chicago
The young Black people that charged the US government with genocide at a UN conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 2014 helped set the stage for local legislation “for some form of apology and reparations for the long legacy of police torture in Chicago,” said Toussaint Losier, professor of African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Losier is author of an article titled “A Human Right to Reparations: Black People and Police Torture and the Roots of the 2015 Chicago Reparations Ordinance,” a bill that granted some monetary compensation for victims of police torture and required public schools to include police torture in the curriculum.
Black Lesbian Intellectuals Shined Light on HIV/AIDS Epidemic
In the wake of the HIV-AIDS epidemic of a generation ago, Black intellectuals argued that “until we eliminate structural inequalities, we’re not going to eliminate the health disparities in medicine, particularly for Black people,” said Darius Bost, a professor of Ethic Studies at the University of Utah. Bost authored an article titled, “Black Lesbian Feminist Intellectuals and the Struggle Against HIV/AIDS.” Just as Blacks are dying from Covid-19 at twice the rate of whites, Black mortality rates from HIV/AIDS soared amidst silence, ignorance, deep prejudice and government neglect. Black lesbians brought intellectual and political clarity to the fight against the epidemic and its underlying causes, said Bost.
Blacks Should Aim for – and Understand -- the Stars
“We all have the right to know the universe,” said Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a Theoretical Physicist and Feminist Theorist at the University of New Hampshire and author of the soon to be released book, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.” Prescod-Weinstein does draw ethical lines in her scholarship. “I don’t particularly support people going off and doing weapons development. That’s not my ministry,” she said.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.
Colonized people, with a horrific historical connection to both science and medicine in this country, must examine science in service of the state.
The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came.
The necessary political demand is not that we make better, more humane prisons and jails, but that we abolish prisons and jails altogether.
This is a book about the ideological construction of black women as “non-human” and exploitable for capitalist profit in the making of the New South.
