| Black Agenda Report

Adofo Minka
The Self-Confessed Bankruptcy of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba
01 Jul 2020
Jackson, Mississippi’s Black mayor is celebrated as a “radical” in some quarters, but his cops kill, maim and abuse Black people just like police forces everywhere in the US. “The mayor’s reform efforts are meant to reconcile Black toilers with the Black led police state.”
Jeremy Scahill and Robin D.G. Kelley
A Black Scholar on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country
01 Jul 2020
If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley. “It’s not simply: better jails, better police, better training. It’s: no police, it’s no jails, no prisons.”
Garrett Felber
The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New
01 Jul 2020
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. “Struggles for black freedom have always had to contend with prisons and police as the enforcement arm of the racial capitalist state.”
Robert Greene II
A Southern Vanguard, The Lost History of Communism Below the Mason-Dixon Line
01 Jul 2020
Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s. “An ever-growing number of radical Southerners agreed that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too.”
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Interrogating Systemic Racism and the White Academic Field
01 Jul 2020
The US university is marked by the dominance of intellectual white liberalism in tension and complicity with conservative nationalism and neoliberalism. “We need an unprecedented support for the units and areas that have contributed the most to understand and to combat racism: Africana Studies…
Chris Hedges
My Student Comes Home from Prison
01 Jul 2020
In 1990, Lawrence Bell was 14, orphaned and living in an abandoned house when three Camden cops pressured him to sign a confession of murder. “Break the reigns of terror by the police and the bonds of the world’s largest prison system and the ruling elites will stand naked before us.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Edward Onaci’s “Free the Land”
01 Jul 2020
The desire for US citizenship was never the sole consideration of African and African-descended people. “Many of the sociopolitical problems African-descended peoples experience in the U.S. could be solved through political independence and territorial sovereignty.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time”
01 Jul 2020
Incarcerated activists have so many tools and skills to teach about resisting brutal regimes. “Penal space is both the built environment of carceral facilities and also the social relations structured through cacerality.”
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
01 Jul 2020
This week community control of police and the failings of the Biden campaign were on your minds. We share your letters for “Yes, Defund the Cops — And Put Them Under Community Control” and “Freedom Rider: Democrats Move Right and Towards Defeat.”
Mark P. Fancher
Is “Black Lives Matter” a Therapeutic Mantra for White Guilt?
01 Jul 2020
Many who took to the streets were out there to engage in a form of mass group therapy. “it was necessary for many whites who had never before engaged in race activism to rush into street protests to declare: ‘I am not a bad racist person!.’”