USA/Canada

“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment of the Negro is raised,” wrote Martin Luther King in 1963, “some of our friends recoil in horror.” ( Why We Can’t Wait ) The US Supreme Court, nourished by newly minted Federalist Society jurists — and no friend of African Americans, delivered the coup de grace to affirmative action in higher education. This counterrevolution was decades in the making, the culmination of a steady erosion since the late 1980s. Even the 1977 Bakke decision upheld affirmative action not on the basis of compensation, but because the experience of...

Last week, on a visit to Washington, D.C., I spent some time in two new museums and walked away wondering why we don’t have museums like that in the UK. The first was the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This museum, established by an act of Congress in 2003 and finally opened just seven years ago, is enormously popular. It tells the story of the Black experience in America, from slave ships right up until the Black Lives Matter movement. One cannot walk through its many rooms and not be moved. Some of the rooms warn the visitor: a thick red border around an image is...

The right and far-right in the US are emboldened and on the attack. Having already flooded state legislatures this year with hundreds of bills aiming to smash the rights of LGBTQ+ people, many of which explicitly target the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, the conservative right are likewise aiming for an unprecedented expansion of child labour. As the cost of living spirals, the right are waging amongst the most flagrantly abusive forms of class warfare; rolling back weak laws at the state and federal level to force kids from poor families into work. Over the past three years, at least ten states have...

In 2005 the government of George W Bush banned Narendra Modi from the US for his role in the 2002 Gujarat massacres , in which thousands of Muslims were killed. Now, after nine years transforming India as a whole into an authoritarian ethno-nationalist regime, Modi is being welcomed by a supposedly progressive US government. Despite warnings from South Asian American and human rights organisations about the "fast autocratising" Indian government's "escalating attacks on human rights and democracy", on 22 June the Indian prime minister will meet Joe Biden and address a joint session of the two...

I can’t see where Dan Katz ( Solidarity 676 ) is coming from with his pedantic insistence that Trump is not, as in truth he is, a fascist. Or where Katz is going with it. Sure, we want accuracy and as far as possible, precision. We want to avoid demagogy and using words in such a way that feeling is substituted for reason. In office, Trump did his best to be a rules-free dictator. He broke every rule and precedent he felt he needed to. He has discredited the FBI and the CIA (the main trouble with that is that he wanted to make them his wholly pliant weapons and tools). Before 2016, and in...

As a regular reader of your newspaper I find you get most of the important things right like Ukraine and Brexit; but why do some of your contributors go out of their way to deny that Donald Trump is a fascist? Dan Katz repeats the “Trump is not a fascist” mantra ( Solidarity 676 ) maintaining instead that Trump is merely “a right wing populist”. That view may have been plausible a few years ago, but what marks Trump out from the likes of Orban and Erdogan nowadays is that he has actually initiated a right wing insurrection which came close to succeeding in overthrowing the elected government...

In the 1930s Depression era America, evangelists went on the radio to rob the poor of their hard earned cash. One in particular peddled the line that there was a mother somewhere saving her money in a cookie jar but not knowing for what purpose. Now was the chance to send that money to reverend so-and-so to help him “do God’s work”. The USA has never been short of con artists tricking the working classes out of their earnings. At the present time the most accomplished of these is Donald Trump. His latest grifting exercise raised $14 million in a fortnight following his arraignment in New York...

I enjoy Jim Denham’s columns, but the last one (7 June) was spoilt by the casual denunciation of Donald Trump as a fascist and the claim that in “November 2020 74 million Americans voted fascist”. Trump’s a peculiar, unpleasant, right-wing pig, for sure. But misunderstanding the problem Trump and his movement poses for the left and the US labour movement helps no one. Trump has widespread support across the Republican party and, in particular among its elected representatives. So, if Trump’s a fascist, the Republican party is a fascist party, too, right? Except the Republican party does not...

Released in 1978, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep initially had a difficult time reaching an audience. It was made on a tight budget while Burnett was finishing at film school — he was writer, producer, editor and director — and there were problems with the film’s release as Burnett had not acquired the rights to the 22 songs on the soundtrack. That was eventually sorted out and the film was transferred to a 35mm print and DVD. It became a much praised depiction of working-class African-American life in the Watts district of Los Angeles, shot almost entirely on location and using many non...

Anti-Americanism has a long history on the left. Of course the American history of genocide of the native population, slavery and then segregation at home, and imperialist aggression overseas, is repugnant to anyone calling themselves a socialist. Recent events surrounding the rise of the fascist Donald Trump and the fact that in November 2020, 74 million Americans voted fascist, only goes to confirm a dim view of the so-called “land of the free.” But can America seriously be described as “the most authoritarian country in the world”? That description comes from Roger McKenzie, former Unison...