| Black Agenda Report

Marlene Daut
When France Extorted Haiti – the Greatest Heist in History
08 Jul 2020
The indemnity Haiti paid to France is the first and only time a formerly enslaved people were forced to compensate those who had once enslaved them. “The median annual income of a French family is $31,112, but it’s only $450 for a Haitian family.” In the wake of George Floyd’s…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Andrew J. Douglas’s “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society”
08 Jul 2020
Du Bois appears to have anticipated the coming of the neoliberal dystopia. “Black colleges are needed as institutions that expose and challenge the false ideologies and violent practices of a dying civilization.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Christel Temple’s “Black Cultural Mythology”
08 Jul 2020
Black Cultural Mythology imagines a world where Africana cultural memory is an intellectual field with its own agency that does not rely on other cultures’ models to sustain itself. “This book reacquaints us with an overlooked intellectual tradition of Africana cultural memory.”
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
08 Jul 2020
This week you discussed Thanksgiving, the George Floyd protests, and allegations about Russian involvement in Afghanistan.
Shaka Shakur
#WE TOO
08 Jul 2020
If there can be no peace without justice, then there can never be peace while the US Prison Gulag exists. “Prison Lives Matter as Black Lives Matter!!!” “There shall neither be slavery nor involuntary servitude unless duly convicted of a crime.” -- 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution
Gwendolyn Wallace
To Abolish the Medical industrial Complex
08 Jul 2020
Like prisons, healthcare systems are part of the way that empire reproduces itself. “Anti-blackness has not distorted medical relationships and institutions, so much as built them.”
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Oooh, what a lil’ Movement can do…
08 Jul 2020
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Oooh, oooh… Oooh, oooh… Oooh, oooh… Oooh, oooh…
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
The State and White supremacy: The Inextricable Link
08 Jul 2020
The demand for “justice” by the public had the ironic result of re-legitimizing the state as an institution that could in fact render justice – but only an empowered people can establish a just order. “It is the settler state, and the corrupt colonial/capitalist system and the interests that it…
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
Beware of Right Deviations That Have Emerged from the Three-Headed Crisis of US Imperialism
08 Jul 2020
Libertarianism, like all capitalist ideologies, is bound with white supremacy. “Mass characterization of the partial ‘lockdowns’ in cities across the U.S. as ‘medical martial law’ deflected from the very real dangers of the U.S.-response to COVID-19.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: The Police Defunding Con Game
08 Jul 2020
Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle. “False friends display window dressing and treachery.”