Historian, author and activist Paul Street has high praise for James Forman Jr.’s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender in Washington, DC. His book “fills a giant hole in the literature,” illuminating the role played by “Black elites in the rise of the mass incarceration system,” said Street, himself an expert on race and the U.S. penal system. “Many ordinary, working class Black voters in the 70s and 80s have actively supported the racially disparate war on crime and drugs that ended up producing racist mass incarceration,” said Street, whose latest book is titled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.
As Black Agenda Report is poised to celebrate its 20th anniversary, we reprint Glen Ford's commentary on the killing of Trayvon Martin and the impunity provided to his killer in a criminal justice…
The Democratic Party is terrified of even small liberal reforms and will not abide left leaning democrats thwarting their plans for austerity and neoliberal orthodoxy.
“So the calypso ceases to be entertainment on a trivial level and becomes a vehicle whereby the society is going back and searching for its soul.”
The protests spreading across Spain, India, France, Chile, and other countries are responses to the global neoliberal order of austerity, privatization, and deregulation.
Under the guise of a farcical “pilot zone” project to restore Lebanon’s sovereignty, Israel is pursuing a scorched-earth strategy while entrenching its occupation.
