Public Intellectuals

11/01/2022

We rarely talk about what white people have lost owing to segregation, and we should. Segregation has significantly cost white people capital. Redlining drove middle and working-class whites out of valuable urban areas, even white people who weren’t racist. They had no choice.

https://landvaluetax.substack.com/p/housing-segregation-swindled-white

I’m not a fan of segregated communities. De facto residential segregation still exists. But now they exist under the guise of empowerment. The idea that it is empowering is a myth and you will never empower, fix, or repair a segregated community. Segregated communities were created for the explici...

28/07/2021

Individualism won't stop COVID-19, we need better policy than "wear your mask."

Our lives shouldn't depend on “benevolent” bosses & governors. We must have policy. COVID-19 policy must be based on science & pivot on data.

22/07/2021

While the origin of standardized testing from the beginning was purposed to favor the better of the masses (the white or soon to be white), it was still a test. A test that the most privileged children did not have to be subjected to, because they were born into humanity.

None of this testing is necessary. Standardized testing, summative testing in K-12 is not testing what you think it is testing.

21/07/2021

Public Intellectuals Teka Lo speaks with Dr. Carl L. Hart. He is psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of psychology at Columbia University. Hart is known for his research in drug abuse and drug addiction. In this interview we discuss his latest book, “Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.”

In this interview, we discuss Dr. Hart’s book that exposes the hypocrisy of drug laws and gives solutions rooted in justice. An informed and free citizenry is a more just society. He urges us to stop allowing drugs to be weaponized and backs up this assertion with personal anecdotes, data, and history. 

Listen to the entire interview here:

https://www.publicintellectuals.org/dr-hart-drug-use-for-grown-ups/

19/07/2021

"The problem was not the ruling class forcing the conversation toward race. The problem was internal to the left, where white leadership thought that pushing for social integration would decrease white support."

The problem was internal to the left, where white leadership thought that pushing for social integration would decrease white support.

01/07/2021

Abolition is to decimalize Blackness and free Black people from situation oppression. The U.S. allowed white people to enslave Black people in their homes, plantations, small farms, craft shops, and corner stores. The U.S. allowed the Five Civilized Tribes to enslave Black people on their territory. We were on the Trail of Tears too, carrying our enslavers’ items.

The point is that you shouldn’t be enslaved under the guise of a criminal offense for decades for not walking on a road when there is no road (a crime in Texas, 2020). Abolition is for people who get life sentences for w**d (Allen Russell, 2021). Abolition is about the fact that Trump, if convicted of a felony, can still run and be president, and Keisha in Mississippi can’t vote.

These are the kinds of things that regularly happen to Black people for being Black.

Bill Cosby and Derek Chauvin are both predators. Abolition isn't for predators who use the system to take advantage of people owing to race, age, or gender.

29/06/2021

The trades are racist.

“[I]n 1980, a federal court in Boston found that the oral section of the exam given by the Ironworkers was so subjective and so open to abuse that it had almost no bearing on ability to do the job. For some reason, the court also found, whites almost always passed the test but Blacks almost always failed.”

—Union Construction’s Racial Equity and Inclusion Charade, SSIR

It has always had a massive problem regarding racism with Black people specifically that they have refused to handle. You think the micro-aggression of the office is terrible?

Blue-collar workplace racism will call you a racial slur to your face then break your tools, if you can get through the door.

The Blue-collar workplace racism of the trades will call you a racial slur to your face & break your tools, if you can get through the door.

28/06/2021

Nixon’s war on drugs was to stop Black people AND YOU. You seem to forget that. You’re persona non grata, you’re entertaining, but no one is going to admit to taking you seriously. You are a problem, and part of that problem is your ability to see systems and institutions in your reading groups, but your inability to see it in praxis activities like elections.

Your ideas, strategies, and dreams are never going to translate with a framework that is rooted in antiblackness and white supremacy. This is why the white left, until they stop playing racist games, will continue to lose with candidates and strategies that don’t respect the humanity and the originality of all people of all races.

There is the reason that leftists like AOC, Cori Bush, and India Walton have been triumphant, but there are no young white men or even young white women with comparable victories in the East or West or even the middle of the country.

Think about Eric Adams race the next time you open your mouth to disrespect the identity politics that you believe the white left has moved beyond.

14/06/2021

Public Intellectuals spoke with Dulcie Canton of Transporation Alternatives on their union victory, the working class nonprofit labor workforce, and on ways that we can stop the exploitation of Black and Latinx workers in the nonprofit and corporate workplaces.

09/06/2021

LISTEN to Afrika of Power to the People’s speech, because it is not just about Branden K. Rodwell, Justin Rodwell, Jaykil A. Rodwell, and Jasper D. Spivey, who were unjustly imprisoned, demanding respect of their Fourth Amendment Rights. It is about how the white hegemony breaks and dehumanizes Black people. How it tries to take your job, your family, –how its criminal justice system is a plantation.

What happened to the Rodwell brothers & Jasper Spivey and the characterization in its aftermath is part of a sadistic pattern of dehumanization in the US

08/06/2021

Africa from the podcast All Power to the People discusses Branden K. Rodwell, 31, of Newark, and Justin Rodwell, 30, of Irvington, who were unjustly detained and then arrested by the Newark Police Department (NPD) on Tuesday, June 1.

After the incident, Jaykil A. Rodwell, 28, and Jasper D. Spivey, 24, both of Newark, were also arrested after voluntarily surrendering to police following issuances of arrest warrants related to the incident. The police called it an assault on officers, but it appears to be people exercising their right to be left alone and not be murdered by police officers who presented initially in plain clothes.

There were no guns were found at the scene.

From the video and statements, it looks that the NPD violated the 2014 Consent Decree.

That Consent Decree prohibits NPD officers from:

Using an individual’s geographic location, presence in a high crime area, or proximity to the scene of suspected or reported crimes without any other reliable indicator that an individual has or is engaged in criminal activity, as the basis for an investigatory stop or detention.

NPD are explicitly prohibited from randomly stopping people. All police are, as it is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, but the NPD decree reminds them explicitly they cannot do this.

https://www.publicintellectuals.org/newark-police-department/

Continue to liberate Newark, by continuing the Consent Decree muzzle on the violent NPD institution that continues to attempt to suppress and control the Black community by force.

04/06/2021

White hegemony’s oppression does not stop with who checks the race Black or Asian or the ethnicity Latino. It also includes white labor.

The dishonorable U.S. Senator from South Carolina James Hammond described this social structure in an appeal to the divine. His Mudsill speech presents the social order as another reworking of the Great Chain of Being in which genteel sophisticated Planters pursue lives of thought and culture, while the Blacks in the field break their bodies supporting their betters.

“We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are [B]lack, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves.”

James Henry Hammond “The ‘Mudsill’ Speech” Speech to the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1858

To paraphrase his ideas from his speech: Every society must find a class of people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not. Assigning status is on a racial basis followed natural law (eugenics).

We work while the (RICH LANDOWNER) white man thinks.

The North’s class of white wage laborers presented in Hammond’s mind and his fellow oligarchs a revolutionary threat to this idea, and it still does.

White hegemony's oppression does not stop with who checks the race Black or Asian or the ethnicity Latino. It also includes white labor.

02/06/2021

"When I heard about the shooting, heard about the shooter’s so-called economic anxiety and workplace frustrations, and then read the name of his victims, I understood immediately this was no doubt a hate crime. It was a “they are stealing our jobs” hate crime. The film “Falling Down” captured this type of violent sociopath perfectly, damn near 30 years ago. We have long known this. Yet many among us pretend not to know this."

An essay by Matt Sedillo

The San Jose shooting was a “they are stealing our jobs” hate crime. I understood this immediately when I read the name of the victims.

31/05/2021

President Wilson, unapologetically backed what he called the “great Ku Klux Klan.” It was HIS rhetoric supported by mainstream media that inspired and cheered on this violence. Violent white mobs set Black people’s towns and businesses on fire. Wilson encouraged the Klan’s violent disenfranchisement of Black people in the late 19th century. Wilson’s record as president oversaw the resegregation of multiple federal government agencies where professionally skilled and college-educated Black people worked. Agencies integrated by Radical Reconstruction decades earlier.

Black people who had attained a dignified life were told if they wanted to keep their government jobs, they would have to work in cages. Then were fired anyway for “stealing” white men’s job.

During the summer of burning the NAACP sent this telegram to Wilson:

“…the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported …to have directed attacks against any passing negro….The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make a statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.”

Wilson did not —and the burning continued through 1921.

Never underestimate the power of media messaging, because that is one of the most potent weapons to liberate and murder.

https://www.publicintellectuals.org/red-summer/

President Wilson was an unapologetic white supremacist. His rhetoric inspired white mobs to set Black towns on fire during Red Summer.

18/05/2021

A lawsuit initiated by Madison, Mississippi Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler has led to the Mississippi Supreme Court throwing out the voter-supported medical ma*****na initiative, 3MA that passed in all counties in the November 2020 election.

Before the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned 3MA, the Mississippi Court of Appeals upheld the life sentence of Allen Russel 38. Russel was convicted of a ma*****na possession charge in 2019 after a jury found him guilty of being in possession of more than slightly over one ounce of ma*****na.

Madison, Mississippi, in Madison County, has the sixth-highest death for overdoses in Mississippi.

People don’t overdose on h**p.

Why therefore are the officials attacking the medical ma*****na initiative? Is this about morality or something else?

Of course, it is about something else.

In 2018, Mississippi providers wrote 76.8 opioid prescriptions for every 100 persons, compared to the average U.S. rate of 51.4 prescriptions. It has been in the top ten of in providing opioid prescriptions since the data has been taken in 2006.

“Short ball politics and money schemes may lead some to think legalizing ma*****na in Mississippi would hurt certain local municipalities. Cities and counties don’t make money off locking up their teens addicted to pills. They don’t penalize nor incarcerate them. They quietly bury them. The truth is, legal ma*****na would help Madison. It would supplant dependencies on opioids with something safer, like w**d.”

—Shawn Jackson, Warren County, Mississippi Supervisor

Frighteningly ironic that in many places across the nation, the treatment for addiction of low-income white opioid users is probably funded in part by Black people being incarcerated for ma*****na.

“White populations are almost 35 times as likely to have a buprenorphine-related (used to treat he**in addiction) visit than [B]lack Americans,” says Dr. Pooja Lagisetty, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.

NPR, Opioid Addiction Drug Going Mostly To Whites.

The Mississippi state government provides counties $29.74 per inmate per day for housing costs. County prisons can also put inmates to work. Employers can pay this guaranteed stream of workers low exploitative wages if they receive any wages at all. These workers are prohibited from unionizing or going on strike. Furthermore, Mississippi charges inmates for living expenses while in prison. Like the debtors’ prisons of old or the new credit cards, some cannot ever get free.

An in 2021, Black people in Mississippi continue to be arrested at disproportionately higher rates.

Black people who use ma*****na are more likely to be charged with a crime than a white person who uses an opioid.

14/05/2021

While vaccinated, people have a lower chance of spreading the virus, but how do we know who is vaccinated? How are we supposed to trust that the person without a mask has taken the vaccine? We don’t know any of these things. We know for sure that 74,222,958 of the people who voted for Trump are white supremacists. The reason we know that is because Trump did not make the economy better nor more efficient, but he did disproportionately kill a lot of African American and Brown people.

This action by the CDC is to appeal to the exact same white racists who felt a few Black people dying to dampen the Democratic voter turnout would be worth it, even if their racist grandfathers died if Trump could win.

It is obvious the only reason the CDC has lifted the mask mandates is to convince freedom-loving white supremacists to get vaccinated.

13/05/2021

A new poem by John Brown DV.
John Brown DV is a tenant organizer in Los Angeles. He shares a rent-controlled apartment with his wife, mother-in-law, and a few cats. This poem is about organizing like your life depends on it, because rich people have every intention of killing you, at least your spirit.

John Brown DV is a tenant organizer in Los Angeles. He shares a rent-controlled apartment with his wife, mother-in-law, and a few cats.

12/05/2021

I observed intersectionality become pejorationed and weaponized to push working-class Black people out of the conversation. The “euphemism treadmill” marginalized Black voices to make it more palatable through its transformation to POC. Then intersectionality also perversely included white women. This in-apparent contradiction made no sense as intersectionality was based on institutional oppressions of African Americans, an oppression often directed & administered by white women.

These manipulations forced us to stop talking about topics like “redlining” that overwhelmingly impacted African American’s economic standing and stopped any discourse that had its basis in institutional anti-blackness. The hostile expansion of intersectionality rewarded projects that gushed over “BIPOC” bicycle clubs in magazines, nonprofits, and art galleries that ultimately provided a black face to a white person who shaped,directed, and co-opted.

Yet ironically, all of this analysis still survives on Black oppression that intersectionality was trying to bring to light. But that oppression was shoved onto that euphemism treadmill and renamed POC trauma, and now BIPOC trauma to be “intersectional.” Black people have become marginalized from their own linguistic social analysis.

Intersectionality is not a laundry list of identity items. And truthfully it shouldn’t be a term thrown around without the utmost respect for Dr. Crenshaw.

10/05/2021

Recognized by Poetry Slam Inc as a “Legend of the South,” Amoja Sumler (author of “Fables, Foibles, & Other ‘Merican Sins”) is a nationally celebrated poet, essayist and one of the preeminent emerging voices of leftist intersectional social advocacy. A Watering Hole graduate fellow and 2020 MFA recipient, Amoja’s work throughout the Arkansas poetry scene was a legendary seed. From his essay’s discussing the role of law enforcement to the value of capitalism he is best known for fusing the art of the intellectual into the familiar. Amoja has headlined poetry festivals such as the Austin International Poetry Festival, the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Write, NOLA in New Orleans and Rock the Republic in Texas. As a resident artist of several southern Arts in Education rosters, Amoja lectures at schools and literary nonprofits, while teaching creative pedagogy and keynoting at social advocacy conferences like Long Beach Indie Film Pedagogy Conference and Furious Flower, throughout the nation. His poetry appears in the Pierian Literary Journal,Muddy Ford Press, Swimming With Elephants, FreezeRay Poetry, and the Antigonish Review as well as other journals.

The Mo-Man Poet/Activist/Educating Artist

Recognized by Poetry Slam Inc as a “Legend of the South,” Amoja Sumler (author of “Fables, Foibles, & Other‘Merican Sins”) is a nationally celebrated poet, essayist and one of the preeminent emerging voices of leftist intersectional social advocacy.

08/05/2021

We have an oped by Mary Walker founder of Montclair Underground.

Today, Liz Cheney beats the drum of “the 2020 election was not stolen,” and people want to praise her for that —this is not about this country, this is about Trump and todays’ Republicans disrespecting her father’s ideas, her voting record shows that she is every bit as unreasonable.

The GOP is corrupt. No one is holding a gun to Cheney’s head. If she was really about something, she would leave the GOP, but no, because this is not about justice or decency. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Let the GOP duke it out and implode.

The GOP is corrupt. No one is holding a gun to Liz Cheney’s head. If she was really about something, she would leave the GOP.

06/05/2021

The anti-vaccine movement is overwhelmingly white, but if they make vaccines a race issue, it becomes a “social justice” conversation, and you’ve changed the game. They say scientists are racists; therefore, science is racist, so racism hurts Black people, so vaccines are from science, so vaccines are racist.

The right loves making false equivalencies.

Many prominent anti-vaxxers are members of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), founded in 1944 to stop socialized medicine.

05/05/2021

The truth is that A.F.D.C. is like a supers*xist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can't divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you.

The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, s*x is supposed to be for your husband. On A.F.D.C., you're not supposed to have any s*x at all. You give up control of your own body. It's a condition of aid.

You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being off welfare.

If I were president, I would solve this so-called welfare crisis in a minute and go a long way toward liberating every woman. I'd just issue a proclamation that "women's" work is real work.

04/05/2021

If you pretend that Florida was about an individual mean principal, you can continue to beat children.

U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that corporal punishment at school does not violate Eighth Amendment protections against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Because corporal punishment has long been common among parents and school officials alike, the Court found, it could not be classified as “cruel and unusual.” Moreover, the Court found that the Eighth Amendment is intended to protect criminals, not schoolchildren.

We must have the conversation on the racism that normalizes physically harming children and Black people. The lies must stop.

03/05/2021

Featured Poet Gold Carson.

Gold Carson is a writer, artist, and musician who first came up in the New Jersey DIY scene, but mostly writes poems now. They study English and art at Williams College in western Massachusetts, where they are a member of hotbed collective and a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Gold is a Leo of q***r experience & Afro-Dominican descent. They are writing a chapbook called LIVE ACTION CAPITALISM. You can find their work at hotbed.space/gold-carson/ and their tweets on twitter .

https://www.publicintellectuals.org/gold-carson/

Gold Carson is a Leo of q***r experience & Afro-Dominican descent. They are writing a chapbook called LIVE ACTION CAPITALISM.

01/05/2021

What the United States calls conservative in regards to politics is not conservative. Conservative is a misnomer for a group of racists who ran up our debt to $27 trillion.

The Republicans are not conservative. They are sadistic racists. Nothing is happening right now that is anywhere near what is in the realm of conservative.

30/04/2021

"People argued that the size of Ma’Khia had nothing to do with her death, and it was simply her Blackness. It is the same thing that has been done with other fat Black folk killed by the state. Michael Brown was an 18-year-old teenager, still a child, but he was described as a massive man as if he were bigger than life and this white police officer with a lethal weapon couldn’t possibly stand a chance against this giant man. Of course, he would have to shoot him six times. Police reserve this sort of brutality to kill the night terrors white supremacy conjures up in the white mind.

The experiences that fat Black children have are important in understanding how Ma’Khia reacted and why she was killed. I remember when I was younger, the way that people would treat me. In elementary school, there were a group of girls who didn’t like me and they pushed me down a flight of stairs. Before, I used to view that time in my life with confusion, but now I realize that these girls felt empowered by the antifat society we lived in to at best, bruises or break bones, and at worst, kill me. I was an easy target because I was fat and I could “take it.” I could not retaliate because it would be seen as more violent than the violence inflicted on me. There was no one to protect me, and no one believed that I deserved to be protected."

—Danielle Young
Melanin Barbie aka Fat Faeirie Princess

When I stated that antifatness was important to Ma’Khia’s death, I was met with violent antifatness, fatphobia, and flat-out denial.

28/04/2021

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From ​ to Black Liberation and editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Henry-Louis Taylor Jr. for a discussion of Keeanga’s Pulitzer prize nominated book, Race for Profit.------------------------...

28/04/2021

"The killings and kidnapping have been a steady escalation in mass terror across Northern Nigeria carried out by the Boko Haram.

We, the Nigerian People, have been terrorized since April 14, 2014. The movement sadly did not stop the kidnapping, the murders, and rapes.

As a reminder of what occurred on the fateful day in 2014, 276 mostly Christian girls, students aged from 16 to 18, from the Government Girls Secondary School at the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria, were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram for reportedly immoral purposes. I do not want to disrespect their families by being graphic.

Armed bandits” “Bombings” “Murder” “Kidnappings” have become ordinary words in everyday conversation.

Hollywood action movies are fictional enjoyment for Western Audiences and 3D reality right in front of our eyes. A Nigerian Airforce Fighter Jet was shot down by “armed bandits,” and there is a nervous laugh about it as we discuss it over dinner, but nothing is funny.

In Nigeria, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is being written in blood.

The Boko Haram Newspeak of “Reformed” and “Repentant” means fanatics shooting down fighter jets, abducting, kidnapping and immolating people to death because your religion differs from his.

And these intolerant fundamentalists may succeed, one day hold political posts. "

The Boko Haram Newspeak of “Reformed” and “Repentant” means fanatics shooting down fighter jets, abducting, kidnapping and immolating people to death because your religion differs from his.

27/04/2021

The Oscar's Edition, no we didn't write about it, but Matt Sedillo did write a delicious piece on Fred Hampton's legacy and how it is used.

"Then as now, many white leftists framed the rise of Trump as a blow against the neoliberal elites. And it is true that the Democratic Party does pose as big tent imperialism. It is true that Democratic branding is to put a multiracial, multinational face on the bombing of nations, the ravaging of the planet, and the exploitation we all endure under capitalism.

But for the white reactionary, a neoliberal elite could mean a Black DMV worker who tells them to stand in another line.

To the white reactionary a neoliberal elite could be a Chicana member of the PTA who thinks the school district should wait a little bit longer before opening up.

To the white reactionary a neoliberal elite can be anyone who isn’t white doing anything they don’t like. "

Mangling the legacy of Fred Hampton’s and, by extension the legacy of the Black Panther Party is to provide cover for white reactionism.