Yik Yak is a an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. At Colgate University in upstate New York, the anonymity brought out a particularly vicious strain of racism that shook the school.

#9 The Writing On The Wall

In the second episode of Citations Needed, Nima and Adam breakdown the history and present "crisis" on the Korean peninsula.

Episode 02: The North Korea Memory Hole

“Building a wall won't save America's crumbling middle class,” Elizabeth Warren tells us. “Sanders healthcare will raise taxes on the middle class,” a CNN headline reads. “There’ war on the middle class,” a Boston Globe editorial laments.   

The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.

But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty.

This week we are joined by Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, scholar and Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center.

Episode 91: It's Time to Retire the Term "Middle Class"

The Historical Quest for a Black Nation
Thanks to the New African Independence Movement of the 1970s, today’s Democratic politicians are discussing reparations for Black Americans, said Edward Onaci, a professor of history at Ursinus College. Onaci is author of the book, “Free the Land: The Republic of New Africa and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State.”
Move 9 are Free – Mumia is Next
Born in prison to Move organization members incarcerated in the death of a Philadelphia cop in 1978, Mike Africa Jr. has waited and worked for four decades to see his surviving family members in freedom. Now his mission is to free political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal “so that he can be with his family, the way that my father is with his family now.”
Maroons As Movement Role Models
The contemporary Black struggle should draw on the experience and example of maroons, the escaped slaves that formed communities of freedom beyond the reach of the slave masters, said Willie Jamaal Wright, a professor of Geography and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. Wright wrote a recent article on “The Morphology of Marronage.” Maroon communities “served as models of cooperative economics, of cooperative living,” and “a model of sacrifice” that is needed today, said Wright.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.

#9 The Writing On The Wall

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