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In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism book cover

Patriarchies East and West

Sara Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights is a brave monograph that analyzes the way that the discourses of Europe’s right-wing nationalists, government agencies, and liberal feminists converge in their representations of Muslim and non-western immigrant women, relegating these communities to commodified spheres of social reproductive work. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 69, Number 1 (May 2017)

May 2017 (Volume 69, Number 1)

The fact that alt-right figures are playing key roles in the Trump administration, while circumventing the Senate confirmation process, is an ominous indication of the wider effort by the administration to construct a new political order, further concentrating power in the White House and bringing the rest of the state into line. | more…

East-side raid - Detroit Police

Policing the Poor in Detroit

On the afternoon of November 15, 2013, 150 police officers raided the Colony Arms, a low-income housing complex on Detroit’s East Side. One resident described the scene: “I saw…cop cars with the sirens…some kind of tank blocking the back alley, at least two helicopters doing I don’t know what…. The officers had real, real long rifles. It was like the army or something…like an invasion….” In all, thirty arrests were made, twenty-one related to parking violations. These arrests yielded a total of zero convictions. The raid occurred on a Friday; all those arrested were released from jail by Monday. The raid was declared a resounding success by the Detroit Police Department (DPD) and all of the city’s major media outlets. The raid on the Colony Arms inaugurated Operation Restore Order, a series of seventeen paramilitary police operations carried out between 2013 and 2015. Over the course of the operation, police made over a thousand arrests; as in the Colony Arms raid, however, these yielded little in the way of prosecutions. | more…

Alice Walker

The Story of Why I Am Here

Or, A Woman Connects Oppressions

Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, and activist. Her most recent book is The World Will Follow Joy (New Press, 2013). This article was originally a speech delivered at a Peace for Cuba Rally on February 1, 1992, and first published in MR in June 1994. Walker’s words remain as relevant today as when they were first spoken.
Monthly Review Volume 68, Number 4 (September 2016)

September 2016 (Volume 68, Number 4)

On July 14, 2016, Cornel West, a Monthly Review contributor and Monthly Review Press author (his 1991 book The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought remains in print) issued a historic statement in the Guardian, under the headline “Obama Has Failed Victims of Racism and Police Brutality.” West wrote:

A long and deep legacy of white supremacy has always arrested the development of US democracy. We either hit it head on, or it comes back to haunt us…. I have deep empathy for brothers and sisters who are shot in the police force. I also have profound empathy for people of color who are shot by the police. I have always believed deliberate killing to be a crime against humanity. Yet, Obama didn’t go to Baton Rouge. He didn’t go to Minneapolis. He flew over their heads to go to Dallas. You can’t do that. His fundamental concern was to speak to the police, that was his priority. When he references the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s to speak to the police. But the people who are struggling have a different perspective….

Black Lives Matter and the Struggle for Freedom

In late April 2016, at a town hall-style event in London, President Obama complained about the rising movement against the state-sanctioned murder of black people often referred to as Black Lives Matter. Activists, he admonished, should “stop yelling” and instead push for incremental change through the official “process.”… The spectacle of the first black president scolding black activists in the context of a rising rate of police murder (as of this writing, the police have killed 630 individuals, at least 155 of them black, nationwide in 2016) speaks volumes about the state of black politics today.… For those trying to understand the emergence of a new black movement—or, perhaps more accurately, a new phase of a longer, older movement—on the watch of the first black president, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential starting point. | more…

Voices, Not Numbers

Towards a Greater Democracy in Education

U.S. educational policy and practice adhere to the old proverb that “children should be seen and not heard.”… Arguments for children—often made by children themselves—having voice and taking action on matters that affect their lives are rarely taken seriously.… Nevertheless, protecting children’s welfare need not exclude inviting them to speak on education issues. In some countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, children’s voices and opinions are considered vital…. In the United States, children’s voices are not sought out. They are most often the “objects of inquiry,”… [seen]…”as either a window onto universal psychological laws or as indicators of treatment effects. In both cases, the children themselves are simply instruments…vehicles for measuring outcomes.”… Black and brown children in particular are made into “objects of inquiry,” and are accordingly more watched, restricted, and disciplined.… Further, black and brown children, especially in poor and urban communities, have had their humanity devalued against that of children in whiter, wealthier schools. | more…

Testing and Social Studies in Capitalist Schooling

In a New York Times editorial on August 15, 2015, the editors, following the NAACP, cautioned that the movement for students to opt out of high-stakes standardized exams was detrimental to minority students and their communities. The rigorous accountability measures of high-stakes exams, it was claimed, compelled teachers and schools to do a better job educating traditionally oppressed students.… Such views ignore the history of high-stakes testing, which has served to perpetuate class inequality and advance white supremacy since intelligence testing was developed during the First World War. More than anything else, standardized testing measures students’ access to resources and proximity to dominant cultures, rather than innate ability or quality of teaching. The accountability movement has successfully exploited the existing inequalities of a white-supremacist, capitalist society to argue that high-stakes testing, one of its primary tools, is helping to overcome those same inequalities. | more…

The Postracial Delusion

David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 200 pages, $12.95, paperback.
Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 224 pages, $19.95, paperback.

If we based our understanding of race relations in the United States on the events of the last year alone, it might seem like a racial Armageddon was upon us. Hardly a day seems to pass without a report of yet another black victim of a police shooting. Independent estimates confirm that the prevalence of such incidents has been rising over the past several years.… What we are witnessing…is a volatile combination of a rise in violence alongside the increasing visibility of that violence.… But despite so much evidence that black Americans and other people of color are under attack, nearly half of respondents to a recent Pew survey thought that race was “not a factor at all” in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the same number agreed that the United States has already “made [the] necessary changes” to achieve racial equality.… And yet…everywhere there is more evidence than ever that race and its cousin, ethnicity, still define the simple matter of who gets to live or die. Whether in the global refugee crisis, the aftermath of the Paris bombings, or the quotidian ways in which people of color in the United States face the denigration of both casual and institutional racism, one thing is clear: race survives. | more…

Interview with Bill Gallegos

As we veteran activists of the 1960s and early ’70s enter our años del retiro, it is time for reflection, summation, and most importantly sharing what we have learned with those reaching to grab the baton. Many of us, now grandparents, are getting questions from our grandkids and kids about our lives in the “golden age” of U.S. social movements. … Bill Gallegos has been an activist since the 1960s, when he became involved in Crusade for Justice, a revolutionary Chicano nationalist organization. He has since emerged as a leading socialist environmental justice activist, and is the former executive director of Communities for a Better Environment. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 67, Number 4 (September 2015)

September 2015 (Volume 67, Number 4)

In the U.S. case, imperialism has always been closely tied to a system of racial domination at home. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote some sixty years ago in “Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the United States” (Monthly Review, April 1953; reprinted in April 2003),

The United States, with its existing social structure, cannot abolish the color line despite its promises. It cannot stop injustice in the courts based on color and race. Above all, it cannot stop the exploitation of black workers by white capital, especially in the newest South. White North America beyond the urge of sound economics is persistently driving black folk toward socialism. It is the United States which is straining every effort to enslave Asia and Africa, and educated and well-to-do black Americans are coming to know this just as well as anybody. They may delay their reaction; they may hold ominous silence. But in the end, if this pressure keeps up, they will join the march to economic emancipation [the struggle against capitalism], because otherwise they cannot themselves be free.

Despite the gains of the civil rights era, the reemergence of what is now called the “New Jim Crow,” based on the mass incarceration and repeated police killings of unarmed black men, shows that the old systems of racial control have been “modernized” in the present, maintaining the color line, if in modified fashion: not only in relation to black Americans—though they have a special position emerging out of the whole legacy of slavery…—but also with respect to all other people of color as well. | more…