| Black Agenda Report

Hannah Gaskill
Report: Incarceration Destabilizes Neighborhood Economies, Doesn’t Increase Safety
25 Nov 2020
Mass incarceration robs and destabilizes Black communities, and doesn’t make anyone safter. “Maryland has the highest rate of incarceration for Black men among the 50 states.” A report released by the Maryland Center for Economic Policy suggests decreasing the state’s prison budget will lead to a…
Dr. Fikrejesus Amahazion
Ethiopia: The TPLF’s Precipitous Fall
25 Nov 2020
The TPLF was a “darling” of the West, especially the US and UK. The two articles below should be read together, bearing in mind the sources. The first, by Horn of Africa scholar Fikrejesus Amahazion,is an historical background and analysis of the forces in play in Ethiopia and the region,…
by Ravi Gupta
Our Vaccine Infrastructure Needs a Radical Overhaul
25 Nov 2020
Public health departments will be hard-pressed to overcome existing racial and class disparities in health care and to address to structural racism. “We need an alternative approach that centers on maintaining public manufacturing facilities to respond to the acute needs of an outbreak before…
Bashir Muhammad Akinyele
Alexander Hamilton: An American Slave-Master
25 Nov 2020
The Broadway show is a fiction and bamboozlement: Hamilton was a depraved enslaver of people, just like most of the Founders of the White Settler State. “White folk’s dreams of capitalism and democracy in the Americas came at the expense of the stealing of Native American lands and the forced…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Erin Manning’s “For a Pragmatics of the Useless”
25 Nov 2020
Schizoanalysis opens up new alliances (approximations) in the uneasy overlaps of neurodiversity and black life. “What can we learn through an aesthetics of black sociality about other ways of undercommoning?”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Lavelle Porter’s “The Blackademic Life”
25 Nov 2020
Despite academia’s inherent racism, black scholars have figured out ways to work within these institutions. “One of the more important things happening right now is the recovery of a narrative of higher education as a public good, and a public benefit.”
BAR Comments Editor Jahan Choudhry
Letters from Our Readers
25 Nov 2020
This week the lives of the incarcerated, Susan Rice’s bid to be Secretary of State, and the incoming administrators of the empire were on your minds.
Carroll Bogert
Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth
25 Nov 2020
By the end of the 90s corporate journalists were feverishly dehumanizing young blacks in news stories, editorials and commentaries. “The superpredator language began a process of allowing us to suspend our feelings of empathy towards young people of color.” The epithet is a quarter-century…
Adofo Minka
Spies of Mississippi: Mayor Lumumba’s Cops Put Public Under Spyglass
25 Nov 2020
Jackson’s supposedly “radical” Black mayor wants to make surveillance great again in Mississippi. “’Virtual policing’ means an all-seeing eye will be fixed on Jackson’s majority poor and working-class residents.”
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Endangering species…
25 Nov 2020
Endangering species— First Negroz and wild Karens in power—members of the Strong- arm Williams-Thom-ass Clarence-led Bassackwards Tribe; Riding mostly 2/4 time, bareback, backwards on donkeys— Donkey dung caked on old soles of their sandals and stilletos…