#33 - Winter-Spring 2003
From the Editors
This special issue of Socialism and Democracy marks the centennial of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk. At the same time, going beyond our coverage of the Reparations movement in S&D #31, it deepens our...
The Constitution was a noble piece of paper
With Free Society it struggled, but they died in vain
And now Democracy is begging on the corner
Hoping for some rain/It look like it’s hoping for some...
Present Conjuncture
During World War I the great African American scholar-activist and NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois called on us to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens…” (Dusk...
We have all enjoyed an excellent dinner, and my job, as keynote speaker, is to leave you with some food for thought. This is not the same as dessert, which is supposed to be sweet and pleasing to the palate. Food for thought is rather...
Global Perspectives
I
The first question people ask about my book A Little Matter of Genocide1 is where it came from or why I wrote it. My purpose was to be able to really stretch out, explain, and fully contextualize my use of the term...
The events of September 11, 2001 did not begin, but accelerated, processes that have for some years been leading to the transformation of the US state and political system. These historic processes have culminated in the reconfiguration...
One of the remarkable findings about the ecological crisis is that race and ethnicity are more reliable predictors of environmental pollution than class and income. Thus a relatively more affluent black community is more likely to...
This essay is an analysis of Black feminist interventions into the Black radicalisms of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The focus is on certain strands of Black radicalism, especially the Black revolutionary nationalism which...
[Ed. note: This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Brecht Forum in January 1998. Although the main ethnic/geographic targets of the U.S. government's "concern" have shifted somewhat since that...
When we engage W.E.B. Du Bois's work and thought to extract useful insights and develop intellectual and social initiatives based on these, we unavoidably must deal with his concept of the color line and the role he assigned it...
Citizenship and National Identity
The subject of race and citizenship is unfortunately a very contentious one in our society today, what with the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994, debates right now about whether immigrants-people who are not citizens but...
Since September 11, 2001 the racialization of Arabs in the US has assumed the particularly invidious form of racial profiling, which serves as the unstated foundation of a new security regime that operates under the heading of "the war...
The hegemonic power of capital sometime visible, sometimes invisible propagates an increasing gravitation to English as the common global language. The spread of English seems to be analogous to the spread of capitalism. Within the...
The events on and after September 11, 2001 have intensified global economic and political reconfigurations that have been under way over the last thirty years. These transformations have shifted the balance of public opinion in the...
Movement Building: Experiences and Strategies
In a game of free association, if I say "Einstein," what's your response?
Probably "genius." Maybe "brilliant." Possibly even "absent-minded professor."
But few, if any would say, "social activist" or "human rights...
The purpose here is to present a critique of the current political trends of the different factions of the Almighty Latin Kings y Queens Nations, hereinafter the "ALKQN," which is a Chicago- based so-called "street gang." Considering...
Yusuf Nuruddin interviews veteran activist attorney, Muntu Matsimela, and veteran activist scholar, Sam Anderson, organizers of the Reparations Mobilization Coalition, for their analyses and candid impressions of the current status...
The color line in the U.S. is nowhere more visible than between its cities and its suburbs. Urban America, comprised largely of people of color mired in poverty, is the flip side of White suburban prosperity. Gentrified urban...
History from the Bottom Up
...And William Siren is going to commit suicide
when he finds out that Nat Turner
made love to his great great grandmother
And he has taken our most violent and militant leaders
and stuck...
Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and...
William W. Sales, Jr.:
It's my pleasure to be at the Brecht Forum to share with you a few insights about Black history. I'd like to begin by being somewhat autobiographical. First of all, I'm not a trained historian. My...
Reviews
Elliot J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001)
Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21 (...
The Truman Nelson Reader. Edited by William J. Schafer. (Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989).
While recently reading an anthology of W.E.B. Du Bois's newspaper columns (...
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Sam Anderson, Education Director at the Center for Law & Social Justice of Medgar Evers College (CUNY), is the author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners. He co-edited In Defense of Mumia and the...