by A.J. Caro* “Did you hear the news?” asked my driver and teacher Mohammed, as we were leaving Ben Gurion Airport after my arrival Friday afternoon. “No,” I said, “have been flying for the last 10 hours.” Mohammed, in his usual calm, matter-of-fact way, described how a family of four—mother, father, and two toddlers—was burned […]
Author: Social Justice
Eduardo Galeano, Latin America’s Social Justice Laureate
by Susanne Jonas* When legendary Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano died on April 13, 2015 at age 74, radio and television stations in many Latin American countries interrupted their regular programming to pay tribute. Argentina’s daily newspaper Página 12 published 33 tributes on April 15. The headline in Mexico’s La Jornada read, “The invisible [people] lose […]
Not Over Yet: The British General Election of 2015
by David Edgar* Ending with Thursday’s vote, the British general election campaign has been exceptional in many ways. Its result will almost certainly be indecisive and it’s possible that the shape of the new government will remain unknown for days or even weeks. But underneath the battle between two middle-aged white males for the office […]
Deaths in the Mediterranean: Wars, Weapons, and Migrations
by Salvatore (Turi) Palidda* The drowning of 700 (and maybe as many as 900) migrants in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea on April 17, 2015, should be seen as a direct consequence of two major facts: the multiplication of wars and the prohibition of migrations. The mainstream media is once again crying crocodile tears […]
NAFTA on Trial
by Peter Baird* Editor’s note: As a complement to the following blog, see the in-depth analysis of neoliberal economic change and authoritarianism in Mexico by Job Hernández Rodríguez in “Latin America Revisited,” Vol. 40-4 of Social Justice. During September 1–5, 2014, I attended and presented at a forum of the Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s […]
Obama’s Task Force on Policing: Will It Be Different This Time?
Blog by Tony Platt* “There have been commissions before, there have been task forces, there have been conversations, and nothing happens,” said President Obama when he announced in December the creation of a blue-ribbon Task Force on 21st Century Policing to come up with solutions to the “simmering distrust that exists between too many police […]
The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement
by Ruth Wilson Gilmore* After declining for three consecutive years, the US prison and jail population increased in 2013. The widely declared victory over mass incarceration was premature at best. Below I raise four areas of particular concern about the state of the anti-prison movement. (1) A tendency to cozy up to the right wing, […]
Reentry to Nothing #3 — Home, Sweet Home
by Alessandro De Giorgi* The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of […]
Time to Repeal Zero Tolerance in Schools
by Gilberto Arriaza* The arc of the school-to-prison pipeline begins in elementary school and moves through middle and high school. Youth then land in the juvenile legal system and, eventually, in the country’s vast prison system. According to current Assistant Secretary of Education D. Delisle, during the 2009–2010 school year over 3 million students were […]
No Moratorium on Protest
Blog by Tony Platt* It’s “déjà vu all over again,” said Police Commissioner William J. Bratton following the recent killing of two New York officers. He was referring to the turbulent 1970s, when in response to the supposed targeting of police by Black liberation groups, the law enforcement establishment created, in the words of a […]