11 Search results for "black laborers"

Remains of 95 Black “convict lease laborers” who were basically post-Civil War slaves found in Texas
Note: Many articles covering this event note that the men and a few women who are the subjects of this piece were identified as contract laborers, but in this historical and sociological context, these people were enslaved, still doing hard plantation labor with no compensation and not out of their own free will. According to […]
Now is an opportunity for Black folks to reimagine what constitutes loss
by Donnie Moreland My father is a diabetic, with chronic pain and a fragile immune system due to rounds of dialysis, which cause more pain and thus tosses him into the throws of a cycle which is, observably, hell. He is also a business owner, which necessitates an urgency of decision making, that suffers when […]
Steve McQueen’s ‘Western Deep’ is a counter memory for Black miners during South African Apartheid
by Donnie Moreland Steve McQueen’s Western Deep is a horror film. Though McQueen’s 2002 dual video installation (presented with Carib’s Leap) is, in form, video art, I feel it is possible to understand Western Deep as genre cinema. An exploration into the TauTona Mine Shaft No.3 of South Africa—also known as Western Deep—it is a […]
Black Power: A Q&A With Charlene Carruthers
The office of Black Youth Project 100 is a few blocks from President Barack Obama’s private residence in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The organization’s national director, Charlene Carruthers, like Obama in his younger activist days, is a Chicago community organizer. The similarities may stop there. Indeed, Carruthers has been loudly calling for the resignation of […]
Conversations We Are Not Having – A Black Youth Project Economic Justice Series: All money is not the same
By: John A. Walton African Americans have had lots of catching up to do. To have thought ground was being gained in the economic progress of African Americans over the past 40 years, only to witness how the 2008 debt collapse disproportionately impacted black communities is understandably frustrating. Government printed money used to reverse and preserve debts owed between […]
Quality, art, the culture of sameness, and white men’s egos
“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together.” —”The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception”, Dialectic of Enlightenment Stephen King recently tweeted, “I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to […]
95 bodies—how sanitizing slavery keeps America’s hands clean
The remains of ninety-five Black people were recently found buried at a construction site in Sugar Land, Texas. The vast majority of reports about this discovery neglect to call these dead Black people what they really were: enslaved. This essay contains discussions of racialized state violence, slavery, and lynching. “African-American forced laborers” have […]
Bridgeport, CN board mandates race studies coursework for high school students
Black and Brown students should not learn about themselves and their histories only in terms of oppression, as ancillary laborers in colonial tales, or as afterthoughts or tokens. These students should not first learn globalized human stories in college. Education leaders in one northeast state are seeking to address this issue, recently agreeing on a […]
Google admits to lack of diversity in staff
On Wednesday, Google publicly released data on the diversity of its workforce, and admitted it was disappointed with its record for hiring African Americans, Latinos and women.
Conversations We Are Not Having: Migrant Mythologies
By: William Darity I frequently hear the following canard used to support the claim that black Americans are their own worst enemy: Other ethnic groups come to America and within one or two generations have climbed solidly into the American middle class – and they do it on their own. So, if they can do it, […]
A House Is Not A Home Without A Capitalist Living There
Big Ups to Karl Marx and Angela Davis The Black family house model has to be the most intimate institution of oppression for Black youth. I’m not being melodramatic with this one; especially, when the house model is regulated by contributions to capital, or money. To speak, to suggest an opinion, to participate in discussion, […]