Author: Henry Taylor

Selected Media

The End of Black Politics

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New York Times, here.

“The revolt in American cities, amid a deadly pandemic that is disproportionately killing African-Americans, suggests that people feel the political system cannot solve their problems. Many have been looking back at the urban uprisings of the 1960s to make sense of our situation. Those protests exposed a shocking degree of racism in the supposedly liberal North. A main demand from protesters then was more black political control of cities.”

COVID-19 / Selected Media

Outside agitators? Where’s the proof?

From the WBEN Newsroom

Read the full article here.

“Politicians and police have been raising the spectre of “outside agitators” since the day protests began in Buffalo. For the most part, local media has amplified the message: Outsiders are slipping into town to incite violence and destruction. But arrest records suggest that narrative is not true.”

COVID-19

“The New Normal”

An interview with Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.

“People are saying ‘We don’t want to go back to the old way. We don’t want to find, on the other side of the apocalypse, the same old type of society…that we saw before.'”

COVID-19

The people in power don’t look like the people hit hardest by Covid-19

By Frederika Schouten

Read the full article from CNN here.

“The pandemic, and the broad powers governors can exercise under emergency declarations, has underscored the limits of black political power less than four years after the nation’s first African American president left office. Black mayors now govern 35 cities with populations of 100,000 or more — or a little more than 11% of big cities, according to the African American Mayors Association. But the nation has no black state governors. And only two states have chief executives of color: New Mexico and Hawaii.”

COVID-19 / Selected Media

We should applaud the Cuban health system

By Medea Benjamin

Read the full article from New Frame, here.

“It is truly inspiring that this small, poor island has basic health indicators equal, or better, to those of the world’s richest countries. This is even more remarkable after it has faced a brutal US blockade and sanctions for 60 years. Cuba’s infant mortality rate of four per 1 000 live births is lower than in the United States – and that’s according to the CIA!”

Selected Media

Stop Blaming Black People for Dying of the Coronavirus

By Ibram X. Kendi

Read the full article from The Atlantic, here.

“There is nothing wrong with begging all Americans to take this vicious virus seriously. There is nothing wrong with begging one’s black grandfather or white daughter or Latina sister or Asian father or Native friend to social distance. There is everything wrong with lecturing a racial group to behave better as a solution to racial disparities, as U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams did on Friday during a White House press conference.”

Selected Media

Buffalo’s Tax Assessment to Exacerbate Eviction Problem

By Ian Stern

“The question boils down to who has the right to a neighborhood? Is it the people who are living and have been living in their home and community for decades, with strong social and spatial ties? Or is it the people who want to live in the new up and coming neighborhood or the hospitals and medical research facilities and the people they employ?”

COVID-19 / Selected Media

A Green Stimulus Plan for a Post-Coronavirus Economy

By Brentin Mock

Read the full article from CityLab, here.

“Congress is already deep in the throes of constructing a large economic recovery bill, to help workers losing income and businesses and governments losing revenue due to the novel coronavirus crisis. But the U.S. Senate is stuck in a debate between Republicans who want to dedicate a quarter of its $1.8 trillion stimulus plan to bailing out corporations, and Democrats who want to ensure strict transparency and oversight over how that $500 billion corporate bailout would be registered.”

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