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It wasn’t just a threat: Trump uses Homeland Security to attack BLM protests

When Trump threatened governors and mayors last month in a Rose Garden speech before using federal officers to attack demonstrators in Lafayette Park, it wasn’t merely a disturbing moment of fascist spectacle. It announced a nationwide campaign of state violence and repression. Acting as a kind of Praetorian Guard (or perhaps Schutzstaffel), Department of Homeland

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Ross Douthat, Black Lives Matter, and the Left

There have been a number of left-leaning posts on social media today in surprised agreement with a piece by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about the trajectory of current protest movement, arguing that it abandons the class focus of Bernie Sanders for corporate multiculturalism. As he puts it: “And so far, as my

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Antifascists and Catholic Workers

Liberal social media is in a lather today about Trump’s accusation that Martin Gugino, the 75 year-old longtime social justice activist brutally shoved to the ground by riot police in Buffalo, is an Antifa provocateur. The outraged on Twitter and elsewhere contrast the image of Gugino as an Antifa militant with the fact that he

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Street Heat

In a little more than a week of mass protest and social upheaval of historic proportions, we are now moving in directions that were unthinkable a very short time ago. Not toward useless reforms, but toward the actual reduction of the power, size, and scope of the police and in some cases perhaps even its

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Outside Agitation or Multiplicity?

In April 1981 riots against police brutality by working-class Caribbeans broke out in London, and then swept towns and cities across the UK, quickly becoming a multiracial phenomenon on a massive scale involving black, white, and South Asian youth. In the riots’ aftermath, members of the Brixton-based Race Today newspaper collective interviewed hundreds of participants

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Riotous Fantasies and State Repression

“Our great cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul are under assault by people who do not share our values, who do not value life and the work that went into this, and certainly who are not here to honor George Floyd. So if you are on the streets tonight, it is very clear: You are

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Bleeding Kansas?

The expanding armed resistance to shutdown orders, from Michigan to Texas, are alarming enough in relation to the deadly spread of Covid 19. The far right is joining with mainstream Republicans, evangelicals, anti-vaxxers and others in this cause, lending it media spectacle along with the threat of real violence. But just as the far right

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Under the Blacklight

Kimberlé Crenshaw has been hosting a powerful weekly webinar for the past six weeks through the African American Policy Forum called Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Failures that COVID Lays Bare. The program has interrogated and analyzed the distinct risks that have fallen on communities of color, including exploitation of restaurant and agricultural workers, the

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Producers Parasites Patriots, Race, and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity

In exploring the contemporary politics of whiteness, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes offer a powerful analysis of white precarity embedded in an antiracist critique of white supremacy in multicultural times. Producers, Parasites, Patriots is a necessary and welcome work.

 Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Race and American Political Development by Joe Lowndes

“This important volume places race at the center of political development in America. Leading lights and fresh voices in the field sweep across the history exploring new ways to think about the impact of racial division on the shape of the political order and the dynamics of its change. There is no better introduction to this subject, one of the massive facts of the American experience.”

Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University

From the New Deal to the New Right

“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”

Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White