| Black Agenda Report

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Shana Redmond’s “Everything Man”
19 Feb 2020
It takes many voices from a world of disciplines to tell the story of Paul Robeson, the supreme talent ad intellect that the US State attempted to erase from history. “Over more than forty years, Robeson establishing a layered and compelling tradition that others have tapped into.”
Ashlie Sandoval
BAR Book Forum: “Books I Teach”
19 Feb 2020
An educator helps students navigate books that reveal Blackness as historicity, slavery as both obscured and ever-present, and the violence of race. “Students should see race as a paradigm for subjection rather than a biological trait or solely a social identity.”
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
19 Feb 2020
This week readers discussed the Democratic Party’s theater and the new arms race in outer space.
Jeff Haas and Dennis Cunningham
The Torture Machine, Racism and Violence in Chicago
19 Feb 2020
Chicago’s torture machine was both a real mechanism to produce confessions through pain, and a racist political instrument. “For more than a decade, a group of Chicago police detectives regularly subjected black men to aggravated physical abuse until they would agree to confess under duress.” The…
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume
Black America and the Presidents
19 Feb 2020
Every single US president—regardless of party—actively upheld white supremacy in the US. “Kimberley’s volume belongs on the shelf next to the works of Howard Zinn and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.”
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
My Wise Country Cousin: Dem Wanna be Lakked by Mike
19 Feb 2020
$elections comin’ an’ Massa Mike playin’ Negroz fo’ chumps— Tolt Dem he’d hab dey pockets lookin’ lak dey got de mumps! Hmm, Massa Mikul cum ‘round wit his big ol’ sack ob monee Gettin’ Dem Negroz playin’ de 3 Monkees— lak it ain’t funny… Got Negroz in a Rush, linin’ …
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The Shocking Death of Rwandan Gospel Singer and Dissident Kizito Mihigo
19 Feb 2020
I would like to say that President Kagame has finally gone too far, that the powerful industrial nations will finally stop running cover for his crimes, but that would greatly surprise me. “There will be no trial or evidence of what really happened because the totalitarian Rwandan government has…
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
The Danger and the Opportunity in the Democratic Party’s Red Baiting of Bernie Sanders
19 Feb 2020
The ruling class’ anti-communist attacks on the popular politician holds the danger of moving the left in an even more conservative direction. “Sanders’ popularity presents a chance to challenge the legitimacy of racist anti-communist tropes.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Bloomberg is Worse Than Trump
19 Feb 2020
Black elected officials will be silent when Bloomberg subjects the entire country to stop and frisk or some other horrible plan. “History tells us that Bloomberg is a Trump with more money and better manners.”
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Bloomberg Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the Sandernistas
20 Feb 2020
If, somehow, Bernie Sanders is allowed to win the nomination, Michael Bloomberg and other plutocrats will have created a Democratic Party machinery purpose-built to defy Sanders -- as nominee, and even as president. “No one knows how much abuse and humiliation the Sanders faction is willing to…