#47 - July 2008
9/11: It’s a different world, ain’t it? Shocked and stunned. And it took that for white folks to realize we’re human beings. Because they were so worried about us. America is so worried about black folks. They were so worried about...
Introduction
As Adam Hakim tells the story, when he was still in high school (a black teenager in New York), he and a friend were conscripted, under violent threat, by precinct police officers to distribute drugs...
Then off they took you, off to the jail,
A hundred hooting after.
And you should have heard me at my house.
I cut my lungs with my laughter,
Laughter,
Laughter.
I cut my lungs with my laughter.
Margaret Walker is the most famous person nobody knows. –- Nikki Giovanni
I see a woman with wings
trying to escape from a cage
and the cage door
has fallen on her wings.
...
America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod. -– Ishmael Reed
Before the Bush cabal’s takeover of the highest office of the U.S. government, in the main only small...
The term “fascism” conjures up images of jackbooted thugs, swastikas, and a perverse love of violence. Politicians constantly denounce opposition policies as fascist or totalitarian. Fascism is a word often uttered but little understood...
Introduction
Fascism is an important political category, but a confusing one. People use the word fascism in many different ways, and often without a clear sense of what it means.
Political events since...
We propose that the current discourse on fascism has arisen from a general crisis of Pax Americana arising from a convergence of developments, long-term and short, pervading the social order and thus rendering much of it dysfunctional...
From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth. -– Goethe
On Tuesday morning, January 22, the Dow Jones...
This government does not torture people. -– George W. Bush
It’s a very different kind of person. -– Attorney General Michael Mukasey
A series of executive orders and...
We’re the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house. -- Wilson Harris, The Whole Armour
Hollywood projects itself as a liberal and tolerant social institution, even as a liberatory...
Book Review
D.H. Melhem, Stigma & The Cave: Two Novels (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007).
Few stories evoke the personal anguish and tragedy that would accompany the end of the world as do D.H. Melhem’...
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Elan Abrell is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and a teaching adjunct at CUNY’s Hunter College. He holds a JD from Boalt Hall School of Law, the...