| Black Agenda Report

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Candice M. Jenkins’s “Black Bourgeois ”
29 Apr 2020
The zeitgeist of Black literature shifted in the past decade, from Black progress to precarity. “The author hopes readers will gain a clearer sense of how race complicates class for black subjects.”
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.”
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
29 Apr 2020
This week readers were thinking about the myths of racial progress, finance capital and primaries, the pandemic in Haiti, and the possibilities of revolution.
Mark P. Fancher
COVID-19 and the War Against Black Detroit
29 Apr 2020
Corporate America and white supremacists have waged merciless war against the Black megapolis that dared to nurture revolutionaries and great music. “For more than 15 years mass water shutoffs were contributing to the spread of a variety of illnesses in largely black neighborhoods.”
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…
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
May 1st General Strike: Claiming People(s)-Centered Human Rights for the Working Class
29 Apr 2020
The failure of the capitalist state to provide the people with elementary protections of their fundamental human rights renders the capitalist state illegitimate. “The people are defining and taking up the struggle for their human rights.”
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
DRC’s Virunga: Park, Gorillas, and Rangers All Under Attack
29 Apr 2020
Congolese officials are blaming armed Rwandan Hutu refugees for the massacre of twelve rangers and five civilians, but there are any number of other predators that covet the park. “The park is a target for those determined to seize its vast resources without regard for the wildlife or the Congolese…
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s Anti-China Campaign Strategy is Part of a Broader Imperialist War Against China
29 Apr 2020
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are taking aim at China to deflect attention away from the American nightmare. “It has always been wrong-headed see China and the U.S. as equal partners in a broader war on the working class.”
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.””
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.”