By Ian Stern
“The ideology of the primacy of the market is oozing from this stimulus package and the rhetoric being used by Republicans. The proposed stimulus only proves Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words true, ‘We have socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.'”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“According to The News, HouHou and his investors littered and left the city’s communities with boarded-up and vacant, deteriorating, demolished, burned-down and vandalized houses. First and foremost, these neighborhoods were blighted long before HouHou came to Buffalo. Blight does not happen overnight or even in a few years. Neighborhood decline takes decades.”
By Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
“Neighborhoods matter in the quest to mitigate the harmful effects of poverty and low-incomes on the lives of Erie County residents. An abundant literature argues that neighborhood contexts are, in themselves, important determinants of the life chances and outcomes of people’s lives. The individual, the neighborhood, and the institutions, found inside and outside the community, interact to influence the socioeconomic wellbeing of its residents.”
By Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
“My argument is that the War on Poverty failed because it was based on a set of false assumptions. Poverty is not a curable disease caused by the interplay of culture and individual shortcomings, but rather it is a normalized economic state within the neoliberal capitalist system. Therefore, the positionality of people within the economy is determined by racialized labor market dynamics, which distributes high-, middle-, and low-income jobs to laborers in the workforce. Within this labor market system, poverty is a subdivision of the low-income employment sector.”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from In These Times, here.
“Fewer than 40 miles from Baltimore, in the nation’s capitol, resides the nation’s first African-American president. There are 43 Black members of Congress and two Senators—the highest number of Black Congress members in American history. And just as the West Side of Baltimore was erupting against the police killing of Freddie Gray, Loretta Lynch became the first Black woman appointed as Attorney General.”
By Emily Badger
Read the full article from The Washington Posts, here.
“’On one level,’ says Henry Louis Taylor, ‘they all look and appear to be very, very different.’ But, argues the professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, it’s about time we begin to talk about them in the same breath. ‘These are places that are left behind, forgotten,’ he says. ‘They’re places we’ve gotten very good at shielding from view.'”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“King argued that Selma and the Voting Rights Act were nothing more than Phase One in the larger Black Liberation Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was about the struggle to remove the legal obstacles that constrained, circumscribed and limited the struggle for the larger freedoms. The Second Phase of the Black Liberation Movement would be about the fight to realize in practice these ‘larger freedoms.'”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from The Guardian, here.
“The incongruent logic of deploring ‘systemic racism’ while championing the US as ‘the last, best hope of Earth’ lends itself to the constant questioning of Clinton’s sincerity. Perhaps she thinks that both can be true, but others might conclude that the candidate has either not truly grasped the depth or scale of the crises in black communities today, or that she will say anything to get votes.”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from Jacobin, here.
“Perhaps at its most basic level, black liberation implies a world where black people can live in peace, without the constant threat of the social, economic, and political woes of a society that places almost no value on the vast majority of black lives. It would mean living in a world where black lives matter. While it is true that when black people get free, everyone gets free, black people in America cannot “get free” alone. In that sense, black liberation is bound up with the project of human liberation and social transformation.”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“Today, 350 years after the first slaves landed in Jamestown; 150 years after the Civil War ended, 61 years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, 50 years after passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, and 47 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks are still receiving an inadequate education, face police violence, high levels of unemployment, low-incomes, poverty and die prematurely. They are still living in neighborhoods characterized by bad housing, blighted surroundings, food deserts, supportive service swamps, and crime.”