January 17, 2011 | In: books
If white supremacy was an illness afflicting America, Black disenfranchisement would be that cough that never goes away. Resonant, persistent, rattling to the bones and always that with which the sufferer writes off with excuses of other causes.
Yet when talking about the roots of Black inequality becomes an exercise in blame, defensiveness and simply telling people to get over it, we never really get to true emancipation.
In Schooling the Freed People: Teching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Ronald Butchart casts a light on a moment in history that was perhaps almost as significant as the end of slavery itself: the Reconstruction effort to educate Blacks as equal members of a society that had heretofore, even in the North, treated them as second-class citizens.
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January 3, 2011 | In: books
After a stay in North America, controversial Islamic writer Sayyid Qutb wrote of what he saw as extreme opulence and materialism in the United States. In a world where so many struggled by with so little, those in the United States had not only plenty, but excess. Their response? To want more.
Indulgence is the topic of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Its Food (And What We Can Do About It) (Da Capo, 2010). As a country that comprises five percent of the world’s population but creates 30 percent of the garbage, the United States’ abusive love affair with extravagance is long in need of an intervention. In the book, author Jonathan Bloom suggests individuals must change their fundamental relationship with how we consume.
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Having been virtually blind since birth, I have had a lifelong morbid curiosity about those willing to write about their disabilities and illnesses. As Eniko Badillo says in the sublime essay “Black Cloud,” featured in Sick: A Compilation Zine on Physical Illness (Microcosm Publishing, 2010), a natural desire is to be secretive about our struggles for fear of being a burden or pitied. There is something seductive about reading this sort of stripping down, presented oftentimes in such a personal way that I never really found the voice to present.
Yet putting down thoughts about one’s illness is today big business. Dozens of million-dollar foundations, books by the likes of championship cyclist Lance Armstrong, and public discussions about health have made being ill or disabled more culturally acceptable, though no less difficult, than ever. In this environment, Sick comes at an unusual time, where rebels are ironically without a cause as severe as decades before. Read the rest of this entry »
October 25, 2010 | In: books
More than a few writers ask regularly, in the era of massive layoffs, foreclosures, bigotry and the widening gulf between rich and poor, why North America is seeing more right-wing populism in the form of the Tea Party movement than left-leaning activism. The answers for this are complicated. Not the least of these answers, the late Howard Zinn’s scholarship notwithstanding, is that America has had a far deeper, institutionally rooted, more militant and broad tradition of reactionary organizing.
Whether represented in Black disenfranchisement, state suppression of dissent or violence against those attacking socio-political/economic players, large numbers of people, particularly white Americans, have historically been on the side opposing protest of the current order. Power and privilege are the tradeoffs for such loyalty. In exchange, North America’s masses can sit comfortably at home as futures fade.
With this forecast, Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (Team Colors, 2010) by the Team Colors Collective seeks to make a case for progressivism in a land where free-market fanaticism and hijacked hope lead the day.
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October 21, 2010 | In: books
Whether it is penning an indictment of civilization or asking questions aimed at inciting radical transformation, Derrick Jensen has emerged as one of the most prominent voices calling for revolutionary change. In Endgame, his best known book, Jensen argued against the spectacle of society. In Resistance Against Empire (Flashpoint/PM Press, 2010), he brings together researchers, activists and others to expose the fissures in the society he talks about in Endgame.
The thinkers profiled are extraordinary. Whether it is Juliet Schor conveying a sense of the history of imperialism or economic models or Ramsey Clark on U.S. foreign policy, the analysis is impressive. But it is Jensen as interviewer that makes Resistance Against Empire so enjoyable.
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If white supremacy was an illness afflicting America, Black disenfranchisement would be that cough that never goes away. Resonant, persistent, rattling to the bones and always that with which the sufferer writes off with excuses of other causes.
