There is a growing acceptance in the US that the war on drugs has led to a system of mass incarceration which, in many ways, resembles the Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement – as Michelle Alexander has argued. Even the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, who, over the last few decades, have backed almost every…
Until recently, US academia maintained a strong division between the analysis of racism and the analysis of capitalism. The former flourished within certain limits while the latter was neglected; each was artificially separated from the other. But that is no longer true. A body of work has emerged in the last few years that draws…
Fifty years ago, British politician Enoch Powell set the template for a racist neoliberal populism that has reached its apotheosis today. On April 20, 1968, British member of parliament Enoch Powell addressed a small meeting of conservative activists in a Birmingham hotel and called for the “re-emigration” of the million or so people of color…
Co-authored with Khaled A. Beydoun, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Detroit Mercy. Millions of people have now watched the video of Anila Daulatzai, a pregnant 46-year-old college professor, getting dragged off a Southwest Airlines plane on September 26 at Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore. After it happened, the airline put out a statement alleging that…
Critics say the case raises serious questions about how the government treats radicals of all stripes. Co-authored with Erin Corbett and Anevay Aponi Zapata. President Donald Trump has pledged to end the “anti-police atmosphere” he associates with the Black Lives Matter movement. And the most powerful man in America enjoys at least some audience for that kind of talk: Last year, more than a hundred…
The US intellectual class has failed to understand the racism at the core of Trump’s political project. The discussion is focused on two questions: Are Trump voters decent, salt-of-the-earth workers protesting their economic insecurity, or hate-filled Archie Bunkers? Are his transition appointments hateful bigots or mainstream conservatives? What both questions obscure is that white supremacy…
For the first time in British political history, a far-right political movement, fuelled by Islamophobia and nativism, has won in a national poll. Yet more than a week after the Brexit vote, Britain’s mainstream political commentators have been unable to state that simple fact. Instead, they see the vote as either a legitimate protest against…
Since Edward Snowden’s revelations of US and UK surveillance programs, privacy advocates, progressive security engineers, and policy makers have been seeking to win majority support for countering surveillance. The problem is framed as the replacement of targeted surveillance with mass surveillance programs, and the solutions put forward are predominantly technical and involve the use of…
The “war on terror” was supposed to contain violence, but the whole world is a battlefield now. The promise of the “global war on terror” was that “it was better to fight them there than here.” That promise brought mass violence to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen and Somalia — in the name of peace in…
Before every phone call that Fatuma Hashi has with her brother Mahdi, FBI agents come on the line to tell her what she is not permitted to talk about. “You’re not allowed to speak about political issues. Or whatever’s happening in the outside world. Or his case,” she told The Intercept. Mahdi Hashi, a young man of…