During the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education, sociologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark received national attention. Their 1947 study, Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children, would prove integral to the US Supreme Court’s decision to end the segregation of public schools seven years later. (More…)
Leftists often bemoan a perceived lack of progress on the issues they work on. Fighting economic injustice, war or discrimination can feel like a thankless task. On top of the difficulty of the work, too often we fail to celebrate success and lose a longer historical view of how the world has changed for the better. (More…)
Foucault would have laughed. That is, at the flyer, and its politicization of mental healthcare. Proclaiming that we must be emancipated from psychiatry, it had a distinctly retro feel to it, harkening back, as it does, to the heyday of post-structuralism, on the one hand, and the era of Soviet mental hospitals, where dissidents were often confined, on the other. (More…)
The city wants to remember and forget. It’s a physical event, an idea, a product of conflict. It’s a context for daily life, for social and civilized modern life, where people participate in events and create collective memories. The city is a manifestation of the culture, identity, ideology, and symbols of its people, a place for their ‘presence’. The city is also a context for governments to establish and declare their agenda and order. (More…)
Hour after hour, I’m bombarded with reasons to dislike Barack Obama. He has conceded too much ground on what’s left of the American safety net. He hasn’t conceded enough on executive privilege. He keeps talking the talk, but refuses to walk the walk. An American Tony Blair, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Enough of this relentless assault and I’m ready to disown him. But then I see something like this. (More…)
Robert P. Helms is a Philadelphia-based radical historian who has extensively researched the anarchist movement of the early 20th century. He is especially interested in the legendary Philadelphia anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre and her friends and associates, and has written biographies of many of them. (More…)
The two-state solution has one to two years left before it is finished. So stated John Kerry to Congress. That the Secretary of State even hints at the possibility reinforces the idea that a new era is upon us, which many have been proclaiming for some time. The two-state solution is in fact dead. The question is where to go from here. (More…)
“If more people eat here, they’ll be nicer to Jews.” So my father was fond of saying, whenever he’d bring my brother and I to Guys and Dolls, one of London’s first Israeli fast food joints. The hummus was excellent, the shawarma was even better. Thirty years later, London is sprawling with falafel places. (More…)
International sanctions on Iran have devastated the country. In the past year, the latest round of US and EU sanctions due to Tehran’s nuclear development program are the toughest in Iran’s history.
With a plummeting currency, medicine shortages, and rising food prices, Iranian students now find themselves struggling to gain admission to universities abroad. (More…)
Margaret Thatcher provoked the same passionate responses in death as she did when she was Prime Minister. It’s hard to imagine a Briton being on the fence about her. That was once true for her American counterpart Ronald Reagan as well. But he fared much better than Thatcher in retirement. Both because of sexism and the suspicion that, despite his fiery anti-statist rhetoric, he was deep down a “softie” (More…)
Pussy Riot was just the tip of the iceberg. That is, for those who took the band’s notoriety as being an introduction to Russian pop. For most Western fans, however, that was it. The country’s rich music scene would otherwise remain invisible. Particularly those confined to the Federation’s margins, and its Diasporic representatives, who record their work for the migrant communities, to little notice, in their host countries. (More…)
Of all the empty statements that US leaders have made about the Israel-Palestine conflict, “We can’t want peace more than the parties themselves” is the worst. The most egregious part of it is that it absolves Washington for its responsibility for the current state of affairs. In fact, if the Israeli occupation is Frankenstein’s monster, its mad scientist creator is entirely clothed in the Stars and Stripes. (More…)