Challenging statues of Confederate generals could become a way to begin the “revolution” that Martin Luther King, Jr. called for in his speech at New York’s Riverside Church. The militarism of the Confederate generals, however, is best resisted today by criticizing it within King’s vision of a world resistance to US militarism.

2017 marks 50 years since King gave that address in 1967 on April 4. Maybe finally – after five decades and ten presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump – U.S. peoples will begin a comprehensive challenge to their own militarized government, one that King named that day as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” King’s joining of resistance to U.S. white supremacy with resistance to U.S. wars abroad was a theme of his last year, between that Riverside Church speech and his assassination a year later to the very day, on April 4, 1968. More

Racism in the United States is white people’s problem.  Unfortunately, it’s everybody but white people who suffer most of its consequences.   It was white folks who created and benefit from the structure of white supremacy and have a vested interest in keeping it going.  Until enough of them either decide to destroy the racist structure that perpetrates so much injustice or until the supporters and maintainers of that system are made to feel the wrath of those white people no longer interested in maintaining it, racism will exist.  Given that the US economic system would not be what it is today without the institution of slavery, it seems reasonable to state that the elimination of racism is not possible within the capitalist system.  Accepting this argument means that anything short of ending the current economic setup in the United States is but a step along the way to a world where racism does not exist. More

Donald Trump’s train wreck of a speech in Phoenix was hardly unique.  It was similar to the president’s previous outings, which were also marked by rambling, Orwellian propaganda, random bloviations, and authoritarian media scapegoating.   But the speech was significant, nonetheless, as a sign of Trump’s growing attacks on leftist protesters.  The president, who never left the campaign trail, absurdly spoke of “all Americans” as playing “on the same team” and uniting in “love,” a week after he insulted sensible peoples the country over by referring to many of the white supremacists in Charlottesville as not so bad, and celebrating the symbols of America’s white supremacist past. More