Articles tagged “Race/Ethnicity/Immigration”

Protests against the police killing of a day laborer in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles – populated by impoverished Central American immigrants – reveal the real grassroots of US society as it suffers through the Great Recession — Editors

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Celebrating the Centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya  (1910-1987)

Video of meeting at Loyola University Chicago featuring presentations by Peter McLaren (UCLA), David Schweickart (Loyola University), Sandra Rein (University of Alberta), Ba Karang (West Africa), Kevin Anderson (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Peter Hudis (Loyola University). We have also posted the written texts or summaries for some of the presentations.

Students demonstrating for immigrant rights in Santa Barbara are confronted by open racism, leading to reflections on the dehumanization of capitalist society – Editors.

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My Story, Part 1

“You should know more about Islam.” I was at an anti-war event organized by my friend D., and was being admonished by a smug, white, almost-retired Marxist professor, the kind that’s all too common in the Rogers Park neighborhood, an area known for its vaunted progressive politics. He’d just been introduced to me, with my noticeably Muslim first name, and had promptly asked me to clarify some point about Islam. I’d told him I didn’t know, a response which drew the aforementioned words from him. I wanted to sear Mr. Marxist (henceforth to be known as Mr. M.) with angry barbs. D. and I both started to tell Mr. M that I’m an atheist, and I also wanted to turn the tables on him: How dare you, I wanted to say, assume anything about me, based on the color of my skin and my name? And even if I were Muslim, why should I know more about Islam? You’re white, so you must be, oh, a Protestant? But I didn’t, mostly because he was quite old, approaching 80 perhaps, and I was afraid of giving him a heart attack. And, I’ll admit, because I didn’t want to “make trouble” in what was partly a social setting.

During a regular ISAP check-in on Wednesday, Haitian community activist Jean Montrevil was detained by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New York.

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Khalfani Malik Khladun is a New Afrikan political prisoner who is incarcerated a the Westville Detention Center in Illinios. He is one of the leading voices from inside the prison walls against the abuses of the U.S. criminal injustice system. We call on our readers to support his struggle for exoneration.

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Racism, Class and Profiling

Author’s note: The arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates speaks to the question of race and class in America. In terms of the media and pundit response, it also speaks to the absurdity of personalization and thus the substitution, in this case, of Gates’s socioeconomic status for the social question of “race” in the United States.

The French CGT union’s racist expulsion of African immigrants from its offices reveals deep contradictions inside the labor movement.

On Wednesday, June 24, a terrible event took place in Paris: Hundreds of Africans sans papiers (undocumented immigrants) who had occupied the Bourse de Travail for over a year were evicted and pushed onto the street with their belongings. These workers had taken refuge in the Bourse du Travail, a union-run employment service, because they have no work permits and hope to secure legalization.

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Hurricane Katrina did far more than wreak an enormous amount of human, material, and environmental devastation to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The giant storm violently lifted the curtain that obscures the racial and class divides that constitute American civilization and made plain for the world to see that anti-Black racism continues to shape the reality for millions.

An analysis of the April 2001 rebellion in the Black community of Cincinnati in response to the police murder of a young man, Timothy Thomas. Though racial profiling, harassment, and murder of Blacks by the police have become an everyday fact of life in this country, Cincinnati included, the events that followed Thomas’ death were anything but normal. The ensuing events represented one of those unusual moments when the everyday becomes extraordinary, when what is considered normal suddenly becomes the object of discussion, argument, and critique. In response to Thomas’ death, Black Cincinnati exploded in the most massive urban upheaval since the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 — Editors

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