books

Klan 2.0: Some 'Good People'

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
In The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon emphasizes broad patterns, making the book more timely than even the headlines of white nationalist outpourings the past months would suggest, writes Scott McLemee. What stands out in Gordon’s book is that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s tried to create a world unto itself through spectacle, mass communications and branding.

The Importance of the Fight for the South -- and Why It Can and Must be Won

Bob Wing and Stephen C. McClure Organizing UpGrade
The far right, racism, militarism, inequality, and poverty are all centered in the South. The majority of African Americans, the main protagonist of progressive politics in this country, live in the South. And the South has more electoral votes, battleground state votes, population, and congresspersons than any other region. The South is changing rapidly, giving rise to more progressive demographic groups - especially Black and Latino migrations...

Heather Heyer's Cousin: Racism Will Get Worse Unless We Stop It Now

Diana Ratcliff CNN
This last week has been surreal for my family. We lost one of our own in one of the most public ways possible. A man in a car ran down my cousin, Heather Heyer, because she decided to join her fellow Charlottesville residents against the neo-Nazis and white supremacists on their streets.

Confederate Monuments and the Movements to Remove Them

Will Drabold Mic
Monuments to Confederate soldiers and generals hold prominent positions in dozens of cities across the southern United States. Over the weekend, one of them - a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia - became the site of a violent clash by white supremacists against anti-racist counter-protesters. There are movements in states across the country to remove them. Help identify these monuments to racism and slavery. List of these monuments.

books

Class & Inequality: The Book that Explains Charlottesville

Marshall Steinbaum Boston Review
The University of Virginia has long been a bastion of white supremacy and its validating scholarship. The book’s author identifies how such antidemocratic sentiment has long gestated in academia generally, encapsulated in neoclassical economics and its validation of alleged rational economic behaviors -- theories that originated in opposition to the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement and predominate in today's conservative and far-right movements today.

Challenging the Death Penalty in the South

Rebekah Barber Facing South
In every Southern state with the death penalty activists are working to abolish it. They include civil rights activists who focus on the system's racial bias, faith leaders who view the work as part of their ministry, and even family members of victims who seek closure but not vengeance.

Can North Carolina's Moral Mondays Movement Spark a New Civil Rights Fire?

Rev. William Barber II Ebony
Ultraconservative politics are bullying the state government, but there is hope in the numbers being rallied to the cause. Donald Trump's triumph across the South and Midwest, which won him the Electoral College and the White House, did not extend to Governor Pat McCrory in my home state of North Carolina.

books

Inside the Sacrifice Zone

Nathaniel Rich The New York Review of Books
We know the rancid politics of the Tea Party, but what is behind the thinking of white, rural and hard-scrabble far-right supporters whose economic self-interests are at odds with their hard-right political and social beliefs. Berkeley sociologist Hochschild spent five years doing field research in western Louisiana, describing what people say, how they live, reconciling their contradictions and what lessons can be learned by knowing these people in a deeper way.

Southern Bands That Are Politically Progressive, and Proud of It; 'More Southern Dudes Need to Say Black Lives Matter'

Brett Anderson; Mark Guarino New York Times
'More Southern Dudes Need to Say Black Lives Matter.' From police treatment of African-Americans to the current presidential election, the issues roiling America today have led the Drive-By Truckers to drill down on the topic that has preoccupied them for 20 years - the South - while bringing a relatively unheard perspective to pop music's discourse: that of the progressive white Southerner.
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