Cornel West published an article in the Guardian where he criticized Ta-Nehisi Coates for as representing the neoliberal wing of the black freedom struggle and failing to take a sufficiently strong stand against the predations of US capitalism and imperialism and Barack Obama’s complicity in them.

This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people.

The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview.

Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.

[Read more…]

There is a seeming paradox when it comes to voting. Sometimes people decide not to vote for whatever reason, perhaps even laziness, rationalizing their decision by arguing that a single vote will not sway an election. And that is of course true in the sense that almost all major elections are decided by more than one vote and hence no one’s particular vote will be the decider. The reason to vote is because if enough people on one side of an issue or candidate thought and acted that same way, the other side would win. So even if the eventual margin of victory is more than one vote, each person’s vote matters and hence the frequent exhortation ‘every vote counts’.
[Read more…]

In the November 2017 issue of Harper’s magazine, Dala Maharidge recounts a story.

In the summer of 1919, the U.S. Army wanted to see if it was possible to move tanks and trucks from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, a distance of 3,251 miles. More than half the route was dirt track. Slowed by sand and “gumbo mud,” the convoy managed an average speed of 6.07 miles per hour. The journey took two months. A young lieutenant colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower was on the mission; it made him a lifelong advocate for good roads.

After Eisenhower became president, he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which established funding for what became known as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Thus began decades of work on the 42,000-mile system, which was declared finished only on October 14, 1992, with the completion of a section of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies.

[Read more…]