Race and Racism

No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.

Countless people are left in harm’s way because of the state’s refusal to make evacuation plans. The hurricane ends up coming through weaker than expected—but then the levees break. Within hours, 80 percent of the city is underwater.

After Mahmoud was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from the lobby of his Columbia-owned apartment building on Saturday, March 8, returning from an iftar with his eight-month pregnant wife, for about twenty-four hours where he was untraceable. Noor, his wife, had gone to Elizabeth, New Jersey, the closest detention facility to Manhattan, and was told he was no longer there. Eventually news trickled in that he had been whisked away to faraway Jena, Louisiana, to the infamous LaSalle detention center.

Labor’s future will also be decided by its response to a reactionary political climate, and whether it can overcome two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics that are now at play in the movement: opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an “America First” nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers. Left unchecked, these forces promise to further fracture labor by dividing native from immigrant workers, and to consolidate a tenuous affinity between working-class anger and the MAGA movement, diverting economic frustration into a far-right populist coalition. This is a time to choose sides: between deeper class unity and solidarity, or shortsighted conciliation with Trumpist power brokers.

In the end, it was this coalition of suburban centrists, rather than the more openly villainous Anita Bryant types, who paved the way for the drug war’s worst racialized harms. By killing federal marijuana decriminalization and pushing Carter toward a “zero-tolerance” approach, networks of affluent white parents sponsored the patterns of disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incapacitation of Black and brown youth on marijuana charges that would come to a head under Reagan and Clinton.