South African Police More Lethal Than US Cops
“South African police kill between two and three times as many people as US police do, per capita,” said Paul Clarke, a doctoral candidate in African and American Studies who has done extensive research on labor, policing and privatization in South Africa. However, “it’s difficult to tell” if the Black majority regime kills more of its citizens than its apartheid predecessor, “because so many killings by police were covered up” during white rule, said Clarke. South Africa is also the biggest incarcerator on the continent.
Capitalism + Covid-19 = Mass Death in US
“The US health system has failed utterly and completely to protect the people” in this country, said veteran activist Sara Flounders, co-editor with Lee Siu Hin of the new, 50-writer anthology “Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of Covid-19 in China and the US.” The US accounts for a quarter of the world’s infections and a third of deaths, a catastrophe due to “the cost of health care for profit, of no national health care, and no national coordination,” said Flounders, who notes that the US “does not lack infrastructure in police, in the military, and in prisons.”
Corporate Baseball’s “Feeble” Gesture to Negro Leagues
Major League Baseball’s recent moves to recognize the contributions of the Negro league teams they once excluded amount to only “the beginning stages of any kind of restitutive or reparative justice and wouldn’t even come close to restoring” the Black players and teams to their proper place in history, said Josh Myers, professor of Afro American Studies at Howard University. “Baseball was not just a pastime for Black people,” said Myers. “It was on the baseball diamond where community was forged, where people came together” during American apartheid.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
As the world ignores the ignominious 500th anniversary of the buying and selling of slaves between Africa and the Americas, historians uncover its first horrific voyages.
Mumia Abu Jamal on the passing of Black music great Aretha Franklin: “She returns to the celestial choir after 76 summers of earthly life.”
“Those hearings that are coming up on August 30th could lead to a new trial for Mumia,” said Orie Lumumba, of Family and Concerned Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal.
The underground radicals of the 1960s and 70s were prescient in their political analysis, according to Stephen Dillon, author of Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison
