| Black Agenda Report

Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Political Prisoners: “Say Their Names”
06 Aug 2020
Unless folks are under the delusion that victory over the “fascists” is imminent, the condition of political prisoners should be a deeply personal, as well as political, concern to all activists. “Movement activists of today will inevitably become the political prisoners of tomorrow.”
Barry Sheppard
Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins Says 'Real Solutions Can’t Wait'
12 Aug 2020
The Green Party’s presidential pick discusses his foreign and domestic policy positions. “We support the defund and abolition demands, but we also call for community control of the police as an indispensable demand.”
African People’s Socialist Party
Bourgeoisie Cash is flowing in the Coffers of Black Lives Matter
12 Aug 2020
We must at every instance solve the question of how to fund the revolution without becoming subservient or dependent on our oppressors. “He who pays the piper calls the tune” The intensity of the spontaneous African resistance across the U.S. in response to the police murder of George Floyd in…
Amy Moran-Thomas
How a Popular Medical Device Encodes Racial Bias
12 Aug 2020
Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin, and the consequences can be serious. “Oximeters remain another disturbing materialization of how white supremacy has been built into our systems and infrastructures of perception—even programmed into the very machines we rely on to…
Victoria Theisen-Homer
Students of Color are Harmed Most by the “Broken Windows” Teaching
12 Aug 2020
“No excuses” teaching borrows from the “broken windows” theory of policing, which has been enacted in U.S. cities since the mid-1980s. “Students of color are more likely to be seen as perpetrators planning to “break windows” than beautiful multifaceted human beings.”
Khalil Martin
Dispatch from PDX (Portland, Oregon); Black Lives Matter in a White Utopia
12 Aug 2020
The temporal-spatial convergence of the largest white city in amerikka, with the most persistent "BLM" protests and exceedingly white subcultures should not be dismissed as coincidence. “The matrix of violence that defines Black life cannot be understood through the lens of fascism.”
Zaynab Shahar
BAR Book Forum: “Black Study and Abolition”
12 Aug 2020
Blackness is understood as always already criminal, and homonormative imagination is no different in this respect. “To achieve ‘equality’ meant participating in the proliferation of carceral logic, militarism, imperialism, and capitalism.” In this series we ask organizers, artists, and…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Richard Kent Evans’ “MOVE: An American Religion”
12 Aug 2020
MOVE’s history is a reminder why police and prison abolition remain so urgent. “Those with the power to shape historical remembrance often determine who should and should not be mourned.”
Jahan Choudhry Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
12 Aug 2020
This week the New Cold War and political prisoners were on your mind.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Brigh
“Racial Capitalism” is the Kind We’ve Got
12 Aug 2020
Theorists of racial capitalism are not interested in the characteristics capitalism could have had in some imagined world, but in the world as it exists. “The point of theorizing about racial capitalism is to focus our attention on the broader forms of organization that are constitutive of social…