Dear Common Dreams Readers:
Ajamu Baraka
Ajamu Baraka was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine. His latest publications include contributions to Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence (Counterpunch Books, 2014), Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (HarperCollins, 2014) and Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral ( CODESRIA, 2013). He can be reached at www.AjamuBaraka.com
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, April 04, 2017 50 Years Later, We Must Again Confront and Reject U.S. Warmongering 50 years ago, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King reconnected with the radical black tradition by adding his voice of opposition to the murderous U.S. war machine unleashed on the people of Vietnam. For Dr. King, his silence on the war in Vietnam had become an irreconcilable moral... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 01, 2016 Paris, Orlando and Turkey: Displacing the Narrative of Western Innocence What is clear is that there is a context – no matter how painful to admit – of U.S. and Western complicity in creating the very forces that now terrorize the imagination of publics in the West. Just a cursory glance of that sordid history reveals the baselessness of the assumption of innocence that... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, November 04, 2015 War, Repression and International Gangsterism A mere two months after clashes between black youth and police in Baltimore following the murder of Freddie Gray while in police custody, President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of twenty-four year old Raymon Carter for his alleged involvement in the torching of a CVS... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 23, 2015 The Obama Two-Step on Syria It was a pathetic spectacle, another black face in a high place in the person of General Lloyd J. Austin III, head of the United States Central Command, came before the Senate’s Armed Services Committee to report to incredulous members that the 500 million dollar program to train 5000 so-called... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 16, 2015 The Yemen Tragedy and the Ongoing Crisis of the Left in the United States "… It is Western propaganda that is capable of mobilizing the masses for whatever ends or goals anywhere in the world. For whatever reasons, it can trigger coups, conflicts, terrible violence, and ‘strive for change.’ It can call the most peaceful large country on earth the most violent; it can... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, July 22, 2015 The Assassination of Sandra Bland and the Struggle Against State Repression During the struggle in South Africa black activists who were captured by the state had a strange habit of jumping to their deaths from the windows of jails and court houses whenever the authorities would turn their backs. In the U.S. the method of suicide black prisoners appear to choose is death... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, June 24, 2015 Closing the Historical Circle: White Terrorism at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church “…It is time for you and me now to let the world know how peaceful we are, how well-meaning we are, how law-abiding we wish to be. But at the same time we have to let the same world know we’ll blow their world sky-high if we’re not respected and recognized and treated the same as other human beings... Read more |
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Views Saturday, May 23, 2015 The Political Economy of Black Opposition to Free-Trade Neoliberalism “ The debased conditions of black working class existence in the U.S. is produced and reproduced as a result of the inner logic of this system .” President Obama and the corporate Democrats continue to press Congress to provide Obama with trade promotion authority (TPA), or so-called “fast-track”... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 07, 2015 Anti-Black Racism Exposed in Israel and the US “Ethiopian Israelis are demanding that Israeli society recognize that their “lives matter.” Just as the announcement was being made that military forces were being withdrawn and the curfew on the black community lifted in Baltimore, images of another black rebellion exploded in social media and the... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, April 29, 2015 Baltimore and the Human Right to Resistance: Rejecting the Framework of the Oppressor Anti-Black racism, always just beneath the surface of polite racial discourse in the U.S., has exploded in reaction to the resistance of black youth to another brutal murder by the agents of this racist, settler-colonialist state. With the resistance, the focus shifted from the brutal murder of... Read more |