| Black Agenda Report

Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Notes on the Coloniality of Peace
24 Jun 2020
The “peace” our enemies want is mounted on brutal war and in its continuation in modern/colonial law and order. “What is law in a context where communities are disproportionately imprisoned and where direct violence is mobilized very discriminately towards certain bodies and people?”
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
The Responsibility to Protect? Bipartisan Crimes Against Humanity in the U.S.
24 Jun 2020
The US committed crimes against humanity by creating the conditions that led to sickness and death for vulnerable sectors of the U.S. population “Police killings and impunity are part of a pattern of racist human rights abuses.”
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
The Movement to Abolish the Police Must Place Politics in Command
24 Jun 2020
Community control of the police offers a concrete vision for what the beginnings of police abolition might look like. “Now is the time to leverage the U.S.’ imperial decline to petition nations around the world for support in the struggle against racism at home.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Democrats Move Right and Towards Defeat
24 Jun 2020
Besides not being Trump, the Democrats offer nothing, but think they can win with a candidate who has no constituency, charisma or any platform positions that would attract more voters. “The purges from the rolls, closed polling places and other methods of disenfranchisement are continuing…
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Yes, Defund the Cops – And Put Them Under Community Control
25 Jun 2020
Community control of the police means empowering the people to shape and oversee the mechanisms of their own security and end forever the armed occupation of our communities by hostile forces. ‘’Street power’ will be dissipated if organizers leave the levers of power in the hands of local Democrats…
Adofo Minka
The Self-Confessed Bankruptcy of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba
01 Jul 2020
Jackson, Mississippi’s Black mayor is celebrated as a “radical” in some quarters, but his cops kill, maim and abuse Black people just like police forces everywhere in the US. “The mayor’s reform efforts are meant to reconcile Black toilers with the Black led police state.”
Jeremy Scahill and Robin D.G. Kelley
A Black Scholar on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country
01 Jul 2020
If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley. “It’s not simply: better jails, better police, better training. It’s: no police, it’s no jails, no prisons.”
Garrett Felber
The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New
01 Jul 2020
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. “Struggles for black freedom have always had to contend with prisons and police as the enforcement arm of the racial capitalist state.”
Robert Greene II
A Southern Vanguard, The Lost History of Communism Below the Mason-Dixon Line
01 Jul 2020
Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s. “An ever-growing number of radical Southerners agreed that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too.”
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Interrogating Systemic Racism and the White Academic Field
01 Jul 2020
The US university is marked by the dominance of intellectual white liberalism in tension and complicity with conservative nationalism and neoliberalism. “We need an unprecedented support for the units and areas that have contributed the most to understand and to combat racism: Africana Studies…