| Black Agenda Report

Jon Jeter
Adrift in a Decolonizing World, the White Settler Makes a Final, Furious Stand
15 May 2019
From Ramallah to Rio, Capetown to Caracas, Green Bay to Gaza, the sun is setting on the colonial racial order. “The global white settler elite is doubling down on the only tactic it knows – primitive violence.” Anticipating a government plan to seize their farms for redistribution to landless…
Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg
In Baltimore, Police Officers Are the Bad Guys With Guns
15 May 2019
Plainclothes police officers are waging war on citizens. “They often planted guns and resold narcotics.” There have been 11 homicides in Baltimore since the start of May, pushing the number of homicides in 2019 past 100. The hardscrabble, postindustrial city of 611,000 people reached this grim…
Calvin Warren
BAR Book Forum: Symposium on Achille Mbembe's "Critique of Black Reason" (Part 3)
15 May 2019
Mbembe invites us to rethink the foundation of thought upon which the world is predicated. “Anti-blackness and white supremacy—are symptoms of the world-problem.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Renisa Mawani’s “Across Oceans of Law”
15 May 2019
The mass deaths along the Mediterranean are part of a much longer colonial history of maritime security aimed at protecting the freedom of (European) mobility. “In the past two decades, it is estimated that 20,000 people have died in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe from…
Jahan Chowdhry, BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
15 May 2019
This week the hypocrisy of Democratic Party presidential candidates and the reality behind the nonprofit industrial complex were topics on your minds. Readers wrote about “Joe Biden Wants Us To Forget His Past. We Won’t.” and “Extinction Rebellion Training, Or How To Control…
Cornel West and Deborah Chasman
Cornel West Discusses Barriers to Black Truth-Telling in America
15 May 2019
Establishment publishing houses are a lot more “colorful” than they used to be, but that doesn’t mean they care about the poor and imprisoned, says the nation’s most prominent Black intellectual. “You’ve got to talk about capitalism, you’ve got to talk about empire.”
by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka
2020 Elections: Its Militarism and the Military Budget Stupid!
15 May 2019
The Trump military budget is more than a third higher than five years ago, while cutting non-defense programs by 9 percent– but the corporate media ignore the issue and Democratic candidates are silent. “Most of the neoliberal candidates running in the Democratic Party’s electoral process…
by BAR contributor Danny Haiphong
Book Review: The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood
15 May 2019
The vulnerability of Black men and boys in the U.S. counters the narrative that they inherently seek to emulate the dominance and plunder of white men over women so characteristic of imperial patriarchy. “Our understandings of gender have been infected by the lust for Black male disposability…
by BAR poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner
Embassy crawlers, kidnappers, Butchers and Boss Tweet…
15 May 2019
“The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.” — Article 22 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961.…
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The U.S. Has Been Eclipsed in Every Sphere But War
16 May 2019
US rulers promised that technology would bring the return of the millions of jobs that were outsourced to low-wage countries, but America has lost the hi-tech race and excels only in weapons of war. “The early U.S. global hi-tech lead was squandered in the chaotic and criminally wasteful corporate…