| Black Agenda Report

Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
20 Nov 2019
This week readers discuss Trump and Syria, Obama’s presidency, and the return of McCarthyism. We share your letters for “The Robbers Have Come Home to Roost,” “Obama Condemns ‘Call Out’ Culture Despite Being Its Biggest Beneficiary,
Wilfred Codrington III
The Electoral College’s Racist Origins
20 Nov 2019
The nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College. “The three-fifths compromise was the foundation for the Electoral College.”
Jordan Smith
Texas Court Halts Rodney Reed Execution Over Questions of Withheld Evidence, False Testimony
20 Nov 2019
A Black man gets a reprieve from execution in the death of a white woman who may have been killed by her cop husband. “Over the years the courts have erected barriers to those with solid evidence of innocence.”
BAR Poet-in-Residence Raymond Nat Turner
A War Criminal Chastises Children
20 Nov 2019
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly.” — Drone Ranger, aka .44 Magnum, aka Iceberg Slim. It’s been four years since he strode from the War House, Saddlebags bulging, and galloped into…
by BAR contributor Ann Garrison Ann Garrison
Victoire Ingabire Walks a Knife Edge in Rwanda
20 Nov 2019
The mass murderer that the US helped put in power in Rwanda flew into a raging rant against the woman who symbolizes the hopes of that country’s majority. “Kagame seemed to threaten her personally, though not by name.”
by BAR contributor Danny Haiphong
Book Review: Learning From the Soviet Collapse to Ignite a Socialist Revival
20 Nov 2019
The rise of liberal capitalist tendencies in the Communist Party led to Perestroika and the eventual overthrow of Soviet socialism. “The legacy of the Soviet Union been shaped by lies and anti-communist smears.”
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Freedom Rider: The Ukrainegate Farce
20 Nov 2019
The Democrats are hoping that Ukrainegate will succeed where Russiagate failed and they can win the presidency without helping their voters. “This spectacle is a get out the vote effort that doubles as anti-Russian propaganda.”
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Public Housing as the Front Line of Green New Deal
21 Nov 2019
The AOC-Sanders initiative seeks to flip the racist script by revaluing public housing and its remaining occupants. “In the United States it is axiomatic that concentrations of poor Black people are bad, while high-rises full of affluent white people are good.”
Ken Morgan
Fascism - The Other F-Word – And Trump
27 Nov 2019
Trump is a racist and demagogic capitalist Chief of State, but the United States is not fascist – yet. “The principal contradiction in U.S. society remains in the alienation between labor and capital.” Large swaths of folks from the left -- socialists, liberals, democratic socialists -- and even a…
Thomas J. Adams
The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages
27 Nov 2019
Moving between the Philippines, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States, the author portrays how workers are fighting back. “It is the voices and sophisticated analyses of workers themselves that Orleck rightfully highlights.” “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”:…