| Black Agenda Report

Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Pigment of your Imagination: Black magic mascots, props and sops?
15 Jul 2021
Could the pigment of your imagination cause Black magic mascots, props, sops— Black faces in high places— to short-circuit electrical gray spaces? Are you bamboozled by black cat dander- goober dust-rabbit foot-spook-ism—like The Audacity of Dope? Did you happy dance on ice twice—dangling…
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
DOCUMENT: James Weldon Johnson, Self-Determining Haiti, 1920
15 Jul 2021
Published in 1920, Self-Determining Haiti remains a remarkable example of investigative journalism and advocacy and a damning testament to the perils and pitfalls of US military intervention. “When the United States found itself in a position to take what it had not even dared to ask, it…
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
What Did We Learn from the CPC’s 100th Anniversary? Leadership Matters
15 Jul 2021
There is a lesson to be learned from the differences in recent U.S. and Chinese historical celebrations. “The U.S. model of neoliberal capitalism, characterized by racial antagonism and military aggression, is losing legitimacy.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: U.S. Out of Haiti!
15 Jul 2021
The United States playing any role in Haiti’s future is akin to the fox being left in charge of the henhouse. “Every step Haitians take towards true independence has been systematically subverted.”
Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
People Working A Minimum Wage Job Can’t Afford Rent Anywhere In The U.S.
22 Jul 2021
Over 40% of Black and Latinx households pay more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with 25% of white households. “’One full-time job should be enough,’ the report says.” A full-time, minimum-wage worker can’t afford even a modest one-bedroom apartment in 93% of U.S. counties,…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Julia Rose Kraut’s “Threat of Dissent”
22 Jul 2021
Ideological exclusion and deportation from the United States, and how they has been consistently used as tools of political repression. “There was never a period of open immigration.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Matthieu Chapman’s Book, “Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama”
22 Jul 2021
This book analyzes Early Modern English Drama as a form of cultural production in which the paradigm of Early Modern England was shifting to account for encounters with black Africans. “What does it mean to be anti-racist in a country whose very foundation is poured and set in the metaphysical…
Mark P. Fancher
Memo to France as Its Soldiers Leave Africa: “Get Out and Stay Out!”
22 Jul 2021
French bullying of Africa has been driven entirely by self-interest and greed. “The longstanding imperialists’ efforts to shoot and bomb their way into domination of devastated regions is a manifestation of clueless arrogance and a failure to consider Africa’s realities.” France has thrown its…
Patrick D. Anderson
The Conspicuous Absence of Derrick Bell—Rethinking the CRT Debate, Part 1
23 Jul 2021
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and time again. “Bell favored a cyclical view of history in which Black people experience progress through interest convergence and setbacks under racial sacrifice…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Our ‘democracy’
23 Jul 2021
Shangri-La—untaxed, socially-distanced champagne- caviar, Cayman Island, yacht crowds who Pay nothing for water washing their waste to sewage treatment plants; Roads delivering their indulgences to gated palaces; Schools researching their earthly strategies for class war—…