Thoughts from the Outside: ‘If We Must Die’

November 11, 2022

Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” spoke to hunger strikers at Pelican Bay. We were dying anyway and had nothing to lose with our movement to end perpetual solitary confinement in California prisons. “If we must die,” let us fight back with Marx’s universal of what makes us human, freedom.

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World in View: Academic tragedies

May 8, 2021

A wildfire that broke out April 18, 2021, forced the evacuation of the University of Cape Town, South Africa’s campus and destroyed a major part of the library. The Jagger Reading Room housed thousands of historic African films, letters, and manuscripts, many relating to the anti-apartheid struggle. Also lost were thousands of indigenous artworks and over 85,000 books.

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Revolt surges against racist system destroying Black lives

January 27, 2015

Protests erupted following the decision by a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the cold-blooded murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Thousands marched under the slogan “Black Lives Matter!” These demonstrations grew in the wake of the equally outrageous decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the murder of Eric Garner.

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From Ferguson to Staten Island: The logic of racism is genocide

December 5, 2014

Protests erupted after the cops who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner were let off. They mark a new moment of rebellion against a social order in which Black youth are made to live continuously suspended over an abyss of non-existence.
The passion to tear up this deeply racist society by the roots calls for the fullest development in activity and thought.

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Django Unchained

April 27, 2013

Django Unchained is a Quentin Tarantino movie and thus, by definition, a bloody movie. There are horrific close-ups of violence in the latter part of the movie. But the reason that the movie has struck such a chord among millions of viewers is not the violence, but the type of violence that it is.

In the [=>]

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March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters is available on the web

March 16, 2013

The March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters is available on the web.

News & Letters, Vol. 58, No. 2
March – April 2013

Lead

From India to Egypt to U.S., women fighting for freedom

Two recent events have shown the deep and seemingly intractable worldwide oppression of women and, at the same time, revealed women’s militancy and determination to [=>]

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