Expanding Mind – Inside the Machine – 10.08.15

A talk with archivist and cultural historian Megan Prelinger about twentieth-century technology, modernist art, and her fascinating new book Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age. http://meganprelinger.com/ and http://www.prelingerlibrary.org/home/

John Whitehead – Sheep Led to the Slaughter: The Muzzling of Free Speech in America

“If the freedom of speech be taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”–George Washington The architects of the American police state must think we’re idiots. With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for …

The Gary Null Show – 08.18.15

Having grown up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Reverend James Stern is an African American pastor and civil rights activist devoted to racial justice and reconciliation between the Blacks, Whites and other races. He is the founder of No Color Inc and Racial Reconciliation. His community work has included facilitating dialogues between the black community and Korean shop owners following the 1992 LA riots, brokering a truce between the Crips and the Bloods and founding a community banking system within the NAACP. In addition, James has a particularly unique history. Having been incarcerated in Mississippi for mail fraud he found himself sharing a prison cell with the former Ku Klux Klan wizard and recruiting officer Edgar Ray Killen. Previously Killen had been sentenced to 60 years for masterminding the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. That story later became dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning. During the course of James’ and Killen’s developing relationship, James became the klansman’s confessor and Killen confided many secrets in conversation and letters about the Klan and its history that remain relatively unknown. His website is JamesHStern.com

Bree Newsome – When Oppression Is the Status Quo, Disruption Is a Moral Duty History teaches us that legislative action rarely happens without organized protest. This is why the Black Lives Matter movement is so essential today.

“When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets.” —Alabama clergymen’s letter to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. April 12, 1963 “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for …

Alma Carten – How the Legacy of Slavery Affects the Mental Health of BlackAmericans Today

On July 22, in announcing the federal indictment of Charleston killer Dylann Roof, Attorney General Loretta Lynch commented [3] that the expression of forgiveness offered by the victims’ families is “an incredible lesson and message for us all.” Forgiveness and grace are, indeed, hallmarks of the Black Church. Since slavery, the church has been a formidable force for the survival of blacks …

How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy By Harold Meyerson

Santayana had it wrong: Even if we remember the past, we may be condemned to repeat it. Indeed, the more we learn about the conflict between the North and South that led to the Civil War, the more it becomes apparent that we are reliving that conflict today. The South’s current drive to impose on the rest of the nation …

The hidden Hazzard of viral activism – KHALED A BEYDOUN

Last week, a daring young black woman climbed up the flagpole in Charleston and took down the Confederate flag. Bree Newsome’s rebellious act at the South Carolina capitol followed a white man’s killing of nine black people at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, the most recent tragedy that has intensified calls to do away with the Confederate flag – an emblem …

If ISIL had burned down 4 Churches, it would have been Headline News By Juan Cole

Seven African-American churches have burned down in the past week and at least four of these southern Black churches were victims of deliberate arson, and possibly six were. This news is being reported tentatively and in the passive mood. The churches burned or were burned. But that arson directed at an African-American church in the South after the Roof murders is likely the …

The Casual, Idiotic Racism of Modern American Conservatism By Tim Wise

Sometimes racism isn’t about vicious bigotry and hatred towards those with different skin color than your own, let alone a willingness to walk into a church and massacre nine of those others because you think they’re “taking over your country.” Sometimes, racism is manifested in the subtle way a person can dismiss the lived experiences of those racial others as …