At Jacobin, David Stein writes—Making Freedom a Fact: Economic justice has always been at the core of black freedom struggles in the US. An excerpt:
The recent exchanges between Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cedric Johnson, and Brian Jones are part of a growing discussion about the exploitation, exclusion, and oppression of black people in the US. Centrally concerned with questions of race and class, these debates draw on a distinguished intellectual pedigree that includes scholars like Cedric Robinson, whose concept of “racial capitalism” emphasizes how “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.”
Black freedom struggles, acting on this analysis without necessarily giving it the same name, have placed employment and economic sustenance at the core of their agenda since at least Reconstruction. Indeed, arguably no social force in American society has fought as strenuously for these goals as the multifaceted black left.
The Black Panther Party and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin did not agree on many things in 1967, but they both thought the government should ensure that everyone who wanted a job had one. The recent calls for guaranteed employment from both the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the Black Youth Project 100 affirm and continue this long history.
Few of these political formations, however, have framed such demands as an end goal; the fight for employment and economic sustenance has always been part of a broader struggle for social transformation.
When C. L. R. James reflected on the importance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, he highlighted a crucial insight that would inform black freedom movements even after Reconstruction’s defeat: black people during that seminal period, James wrote, “had tried to carry out ideas that went beyond the prevailing conceptions of bourgeois democracy.”
James’s comments came in the late 1940s, after Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign had been roundly beaten and when the possibilities for welfare state expansion were waning. Yet what James identified in Du Bois’s book is worth reconsidering: black freedom struggles have historically been at the heart of efforts to expand democracy, to use the power of the vote to transform the capitalist state into an institution that provides material benefits for all. [...]
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FFS DU JOUR
It’s Pathetic That City Councilwomen Have to Intervene to End This Rotten Policy
For women incarcerated in America's prison industrial complex, practicing proper menstrual hygiene is almost impossible. That's because, criminal justice advocates say, inmates are supplied with an inadequate amount of pads or denied feminine hygiene products altogether.
But [along with two others] New York City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras-Copeland hopes to change that. After months of planning, Ferreras-Copeland formally introduced her long-awaited package of bills on Tuesday that would make menstrual products free and accessible in correctional facilities, as well as in public schools and homeless shelters. [...]
The New York City Department of Corrections currently provides 144-count boxes of thin, non-adhesive pads per 50 inmates in the Rose M. Singer Center—the only women's facility in the Rikers Island jail complex. [...]
"Do the math on that," says Jill Miller, New York chapter director for Days for Girls International, which provides washable feminine hygiene kits to women and girls in need. "That's 2.8 pads per woman."
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TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Dog whistle politics:
Over the past few weeks, a new expression has entered the Westminster lexicon: dog-whistle politics. It means putting out a message that, like a high-pitched dog-whistle, is only fully audible to those at whom it is directly aimed. The intention is to make potential supporters sit up and take notice while avoiding offending those to whom the message will not appeal.
We saw the Republicans employ that in 2004 to some degree. For example, Bush's puzzling debate diss of the Dred Scott decision left the vast majority of people scratching their heads, but the anti-abortion movement knew exactly what he was saying. It's Religious Right code for attacking Roe v. Wade.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin helps round up weekend news: Brussels and Lahore internationally; primary results and polling at home. Did you caucus for Bernie and win? Would you do it again next month? More reason not to fear superdelegates, and become one instead.
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