How the Camp Fire Was a Social Disaster by Michael J. Coyle* The Camp Fire, which crushed the lives and livelihoods of the 30,000 residents of the town of Paradise, California, was not just a natural disaster. It was a social tragedy rooted in inequality and injustice. The Camp Fire is but another example in […]
Author: Social Justice
Brazil, an Urgent Situation
by Clifford Welch* The front-runner in Brazil’s upcoming presidential election refuses to debate his opponent. He prefers to generate and reproduce disinformation about his opponent without ever issuing an apology or correction. Sounds familiar? In fact, front-runner Jair Bolsonaro looks upon Donald Trump as his mentor, and Trump’s former campaign manager, Steve Bannon, has been […]
The Mexican Breakthrough
by John M. Ackerman* The historic victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the July 1st Mexican presidential election stands out as a beacon of hope amidst the turbulent sea of contemporary global politics. The collapse of the post–Cold War political establishment has conjured up a panoply of increasingly strange and dangerous demons throughout the […]
“Millions and Millions of Lulas”: A Post from Brazil
by Clifford Welch* Thirty-eight years ago, in April, 1980 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva went to jail for the first time. On April 7, 2018, the former president of Brazil, one of the most beloved politicians in the world, went to jail for the second time. Both times the metalworkers union in the industrial suburbs […]
The Kerner Report’s 50th Anniversary: An Occasion to Rewrite History
by Tony Platt* Anniversaries provide many opportunities for revisionist and wishful thinking about the past. The 50th anniversary of the Kerner Report is no exception. The new mythology remakes the Kerner Commission as a bastion of liberal democracy and enlightened social science, betrayed by a political system, especially President Johnson, that succumbed to political pressures […]
Silenced Press: The State of Democracy in Mexico
by Antonio Martínez Velázquez* In 1906 Ricardo Flores Magón, an intellectual who fought for freedom and equality during the Mexican Revolution, criticized the “venality and aggressive cynicism” of a press that was “praising the clumsiness and wrongdoings of the government […] covering up crimes, threatening virtues, spreading evil and barbarism.” Today, the situation in Mexico […]
Temporary Status Means Permanent Uncertainty: Salvadorans and TPS
by Susan Bibler Coutin* On January 8, 2018, the Trump Administration announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans would expire on September 9, 2019, giving rise to deep uncertainty about the future of the 195,000 Salvadorans who currently hold this status. The stated rationale for rescinding the program is that the original conditions that […]
Abolish the Israeli Juvenile Military Court
by Smadar Ben-Natan* The Israeli public was outraged in December when a video of Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl from Nebi Salah in the occupied West Bank, went viral. The video documents her and her cousin, Nour Tamimi, slapping and kicking Israeli soldiers out of their house. The soldiers’ justified restraint towards young unarmed […]
Hurricane Maria: Puerto Rico’s Unnatural Disaster
by Hilda Lloréns, Ruth Santiago, Carlos G. Garcia-Quijano, and Catalina M. de Onís* Hurricanes are thought of as “natural” disasters, but the social and environmental devastation wrought upon Puerto Rico by Hurricane María last September is really an unnatural disaster resulting from a long history of colonial subjugation, economic hardship, environmental injustice, infrastructural neglect, and, at the local level, a broken […]
Queerly Tèhuäntin | Cuir Us
by Edward J. McCaughan & Ani Rivera* If going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera The queer aesthetic frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning […]