| Black Agenda Report

Wilmer J. Leon III
COVID-19 and America - The Fire This Time
06 May 2020
It is immoral if not criminal for the US to increase sanctions through its “maximum pressure campaigns” against Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and Palestine. “Weaponizing disease for political purposes to bring about regime change is the same as germ warfare and should be considered a crime…
Lauren Smith
Fighting the Invisible Enemy: Imperial Fascism 2020, Not Covid-19
06 May 2020
What could possibly be a more effective way to seal borders, discourage protest, and position the United States into perfect alignment for WWIII? “At minimum, one could convincingly argue that the arrival of COVID-19 is fortuitous for certain economic sectors within the United States.”
Marisa Fuentes
BAR Book Forum: Symposium on Sarah Haley’s "No Mercy Here"
06 May 2020
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. “Black women were maligned as non-normative, ‘outside the category woman,’ and sexually deviant.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd’s “Break Every Yoke”
06 May 2020
The necessary political demand is not that we make better, more humane prisons and jails, but that we abolish prisons and jails altogether. “The neoliberal order that reigned from Reagan through Obama is rapidly coming unglued.”
Sarah Lustbader
US Prisons Are Vectors of Disease
06 May 2020
The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came. “As black men are disproportionately incarcerated, infectious disease spreads disproportionally in black communities.”
Erica Caines
The Makings of A Capitalist Dystopia
06 May 2020
Colonized people, with a horrific historical connection to both science and medicine in this country, must examine science in service of the state. “In the push to ‘re-open’ the economy, we are seeing many AI-driven technologies become more widely adopted and implemented as a response to COVID-19.”
Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Coronavirus and the Politics of Disposability
06 May 2020
When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed. “The people whose disposability is on widest display are those who work in immediate-risk industries: the financially precarious service workers, the health care workers tasked with…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Mayday 2020
06 May 2020
(For Ferguson, Baltimore, Million Workers March, Arab Spring, Standing Rock, Occupy, Jackson Rising, Fight for Fifteen, Extinction Rebellion, #Me Too…) Magnolia scents of class Struggle fill early morning air. Rippling heat waves of resistance rise up, up, up in refreshing spring …
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
United States of Distraction: A Book Review
06 May 2020
The authors recount and document the descent into “post-truth” partisan journalism from the alt-right to the right, liberal, and even independent left media, between 2016 and now. “Team Clinton had imagined Trump would be the easiest Republican to beat, but the strategy backfired.”
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
In the People’s War against COVID-19, Socialism Offers Victory while Capitalism Spells Defeat
06 May 2020
Socialist societies are capable of doing much more to contain diseases like Covid-19, such as rapid testing, neighborhood food deliveries, and the use of AI technology to trace contacts and symptoms. “In struggle to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest enemy of the people is not partial…