President Biden is under intense pressure from activists around the country to abolish the federal death penalty after a state-sanctioned bloodbath marked the end of his predecessor’s first and only term. President Donald Trump went on a killing spree and had 13 people legally lynched in the last six months of his presidency between July 2020 and January 2021. Prior to those executions, there had not been a federal execution since 2003.
Protesters march on the Texas State Capitol building at the annual 2011 March to Abolish the Death Penalty.
“The pace of [Trump’s] federal executions has no historical precedent,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, in a press release Nov. 30, 2020. “The last time more than one person was executed during a transition period takes us back to Grover Cleveland’s first presidency in the end of the 1880s.”
Voter suppression – class war against workers
By Editor posted on July 9, 2021
A July 1 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court issued a death blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protected historically disenfranchised voters of color.
Election night, Lowndes County, Ala., Nov. 8, 1966.
In a 6-3 ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the right-wing majority court nullified Section 2 of the Act, which barred voting procedures that “result in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The section was the last effective portion of the Act, already seriously damaged by the Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder.
In her new book, Gordon-Reed reminds us that besides offering us origin stories the past can also provides us with a way to think about the present and future.
Will Skillman Fellow in Education A child walks by graffiti on H St. NW, on Monday, June 1, 2020, after weekend protests sparked by the death of George Floyd occurred near the White House. Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty Images
Key Takeaways
CRT theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.”
CRT intellectuals are trying to change the view that racism is an individual issue, and insist it is systemic, in order to get society to change the entire system.
The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race.
We spend many waking hours preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work, and many of us live in societies that, in the words of scholar Kathi Weeks, “expect people to work for wages.” In
The transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s–1800s bound up capitalism with colonialism and racism. Slavery was progressively abolished starting in the late eighteenth century in Haiti and continued through the nineteenth century, but this did not bring an end to racial hierarchies or the entanglement between race, capitalism, and colonialism. Instead, the transition to free wage labor accompanied the rise of scientific racism, the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, and heightened rivalries among competing empires.