| Black Agenda Report

Susie Day
Puerto Rico, Protest, Prison: Johanna Fernández and Jose Saldaña on The Young Lords
29 Apr 2020
“There’s something profoundly liberating for people who’ve been told all their lives that they ain’t shit to stand up.” “The Young Lords saved me from a meaningless death.”
Jon Jeter
Michael Jordan's Sad Legacy as the Plutocrats' Champ, and the Anti-Ali
29 Apr 2020
Ali, the People’s Champ, hurtled into the breach to come to the aid of his community while Jordan did all he could to distance himself. “Jordan turned his back on his tribe, his community and the working class into which he was born.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Fighting COVID-19 with Mass Action and a People’s Strike
29 Apr 2020
The people’s mass fightback against the system that failed to protect them from the coronavirus and corporate predators begins May 1. “The masses are suffering, but the black misleadership class behaves as it usually does, playing their part as a fake opposition to Trump.””
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
It’s capitalism, baby… / 1 %-Funded Rally Actors / Solidarity
29 Apr 2020
It’s capitalism, baby… Gravediggers feed hungry Hart Island trenches plain pine coffins; stacked three-high, they rest side by side in solidarity. For now, they share island real estate with AIDS and1918 Flu fallen. New York is not new to this. Ask African Burial Ground Ancestors—it’s capitalism…
Dean Spade and Roberto Sirvent, BAR Contributors
BAR Abolition & Mutual Aid Spotlight: Timmy Châu
29 Apr 2020
We need to understand mutual aid work as part and parcel to the work of all radical organizing. “Policing is a necessarily white supremacist and violent system weaponized by the ruling class to contain, maim and murder communities deemed disposable by the state.”
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Late-Stage Racial Capitalism Opened the Door to the Killer Virus
30 Apr 2020
The white settler state always inflicts excessive mortality on racially subject peoples, and capitalism inflicts death on large sections of its disproportionately non-white working class and poor. “Capitalism is constantly imposing a monstrous, rolling triage on the populations it controls.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Joe Biden and the Black Misleaders
06 May 2020
The black misleadership class has no shame, only narrow ambitions. They are now called out to rescue the man who looks very much like a loser. “Stacey Abrams couched her criticisms of Trump with criticisms of Xi Jinping and blather about defeating communism.”
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
In the People’s War against COVID-19, Socialism Offers Victory while Capitalism Spells Defeat
06 May 2020
Socialist societies are capable of doing much more to contain diseases like Covid-19, such as rapid testing, neighborhood food deliveries, and the use of AI technology to trace contacts and symptoms. “In struggle to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest enemy of the people is not partial…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Mayday 2020
06 May 2020
(For Ferguson, Baltimore, Million Workers March, Arab Spring, Standing Rock, Occupy, Jackson Rising, Fight for Fifteen, Extinction Rebellion, #Me Too…) Magnolia scents of class Struggle fill early morning air. Rippling heat waves of resistance rise up, up, up in refreshing spring breezes from…
Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Coronavirus and the Politics of Disposability
06 May 2020
When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed. “The people whose disposability is on widest display are those who work in immediate-risk industries: the financially precarious service workers, the health care workers tasked with…