As with any victim-offender situation, restorative justice processes begin when the perpetrators of harm acknowledge what they did and take responsibility for the harms they caused. If the restorative justice movement fails to address the colonial crimes embedded in our history, it will risk losing credibility in this country, as it seems to have already done in Canada. Restorative justice does not have to be hijacked into being an accomplice to colonization, for its roots are not there.
Editorials & Actions
Bill Fletcher on Race in the Obama Years
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Why the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our lifetimes.
2011
Postwar Dystopia or Family Paradise?
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SECOND SUBURB: LEVITTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA, edited by Dianne Harris, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
2011
The Real Education Reformers: Why Chicago Mothers and Teachers Are Doing More than “Waiting for Superman”
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Don’t race to the top, look to the grassroots for the future health of our schools.
2011
The Master’s Mehserle Can Never Dismantle the Master’s House
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The emphasis on the conviction and sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, in Oakland on New Year’s morning, 2009, is actively preventing us from addressing the real systemic sickness that led to this death and many millions gone.
2011
Tikkun Olam Starts at Home
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In 1957, my parents and several other families helped the first African American family move into Levittown, Pennsylvania. That post-war suburb had been previously all white because the developer, William Levitt, a rabbi’s grandson, refused to sell houses to blacks.
2011
Dare to Struggle
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Today, conditions are as dire as those we faced in the 1960s, but we are not coming together with sufficient urgency to confront them. Climate change threatens the very existence of a habitable planet, but here in the United States, the business of burning fossil fuels continues as usual.
2010
Racial Justice: New Structures and New Selves
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In his famous March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, then-candidate Obama asked us to move beyond a racial politics that demands a perpetrator and a victim and instead to begin to embrace the full complexity of race in this country. Yet, as we enter the winter of 2010, this rhetoric of hope and change has given way to an administration that has been disappointingly silent on race, as well as milquetoast in its policy prescriptions, even as multiple populist movements stir up white fear and anger.
2010
Oscar Grant or Lebron James? The Systemic Devaluation of Black Life in America
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On the same day that millions of people watched Lebron James announce he was going to Miami, twelve jurors in Oscar Grant’s case decided that, unless he can put a ball through a hoop, a black man’s life is worth little in America. Two decisions — both resulting from five hundred years of white supremacy.
Articles
Comment on Tony Campolo’s Critique of Darwinism
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Tony Campolo’s essay is, in one regard, extremely well-informed and timely, but in another regard dangerously ill-informed about Darwin himself. The basic problem is that Darwin’s theory came in two halves.
Articles
What’s Wrong with Darwinism
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Darwin was a racist, and his racist theories have had an enormous impact on American thinking. In terms of science, Darwin’s account may be solid indeed. But value-free? Nothing could be further from the truth — and that’s where the problem lies.
2010
Undiscovered No Longer
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“The Undiscovered Paul Robeson” by Paul Robeson Jr.: Review by Paul Von Blum
2010
Immigration: Don’t Let “Reform” Be an Excuse for Increased Repression
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. . . it relies on the idea of providing temporary worker visas to lower-skilled immigrants who are apparently expected to send their money home, providing American farmers, agribusiness, and other employers with a source of cheap labor that can depress the wages of other laborers.
1994
That Black-Jewish Thing: What’s Going On?
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Late last May at San Francisco State University, in the week before final exams an African-American artist named Senay Dennis unfurled a mural he had painted t honor Malcolm X and his legacy. The mural was commissioned by the Student Union Governing Board, and the artist was paid $1,500 in student funds. The idea that Malcolm was worthy of a major artistic monument was evidently universally accepted on this very multicultural urban campus, a place that pioneered “Third World” or Ethnic Studies in the late 1960s as well as faculty unionism on the West Coast. What was controversial was the fact that the artist had surrounded the image of Black nationalism’s patron saint with Stars of David, which were next to dollar signs, skull and cross-bones, and the phrase “African Blood.”