| Black Agenda Report

Minkah Makalani
Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race
10 Feb 2021
An examination Robinson’s body of work can enrich our understanding of racial capitalism and offer additional tools for overcoming our political impasse. “Black radicalism suggests a poetics that can be found in the generative potential of human interaction, with all its historical contingencies…
Joshua F.J. Inwood and Anna Livia Brand
Slave-built Infrastructure and Reparations
10 Feb 2021
US cities from Atlanta to New York City still use buildings, roads, ports and rail lines built by enslaved people. “Far from being an artifact of history, as some critics of reparations suggest, slavery has a tangible presence in the American economy.”
Former Inland Empire BLM
Black Lives Matter Inland Empire Announces Break WIth BLM Global Network
10 Feb 2021
Black Lives Matter Inland Empire, in an open letter, last week announced its departure from the cash-heavy Black Lives Global Network. “The issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party.” To our community,
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Moya Bailey’s “Misogynoir Transformed”
10 Feb 2021
The author maintains it is a myth that digital activism is less important than the organizing being done on the ground. “Black women’s relationship to feminism has always been a reflection of ‘both/and,’ where both race and gender were crucial to the strategies and futures we developed.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Anthony Reed’s “Soundworks”
10 Feb 2021
This week’s author views black aesthetics as a practice of freedom that imagines and conjures alternative social arrangements. “Enterprise zones and elections are not an inevitable outcome of the revolutionary moment, but clues to how it was defeated.”
Jahan Choudhry, BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
10 Feb 2021
This week you discussed the multilayer crisis facing American people. We share your letters for “Nightmare Years Will Repeat Themselves – Until the People Kick Out the Cabal,” in which Glen Ford argues that only a Black led movement with ideological clarity can end the capitalist disaster the U.S.…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Black Lives Matter…
10 Feb 2021
B-B-B-Black Lives M-M-M-Matter… Unless you listening to loud music; shoveling snow; Or own a phone or car… B-B-B-Black Lives M-M-M-Matter… Unless you breaking up a fight; or your brake light’s broken… B-B-B-Black Lives M-M-M-Matter… Unless you a Chicago child unschooled in Mississippi apartheid;…
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
There is no Color-Blind Road to Socialism in the United States
10 Feb 2021
The Democratic Party is not anti-racist because of its “diversity”; it is in fact becoming a more effective agent of a racist and imperialist state. “Obama’s legacy continues to haunt the Left in ways that have gone unrecognized to the naked eye.”
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Ugandans Still Resisting Museveni’s Play to Stay in Power
10 Feb 2021
“Radically rude” poet Stella Nyanzi and opposition leader Kizza Besigye join Bobi Wine in rejecting Museveni’s claim to have been rightfully re-elected. “If they are ready to free themselves, in two weeks, three weeks, they will be free.”
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
Black Citizenship Forum: Black Citizenship and the Problem of “Coloniality”
10 Feb 2021
Blacks subject as a stateless and rightless provider of cheap labor in a globalized and racial capitalist economy. “Decolonization struggles – and later postcolonial nation-building and state-making – were constantly undercut by ethnic fractures and tribalism.”