Articles
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Black businesses in Wilmington, 1897 (LEFT) Less than 40% of those still remained, 1900 (RIGHT) Hidden Power, Codified Inequality: From Jim Crow to Project 2025
How did the architects of Wilmington’s coup moved seamlessly from physical to structural violence? Their use of hidden power exposes how modern institutional frameworks like Project 2025 echo historical legal blueprints to hoard power for a privileged elite. Physical violence...
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Our Experiences are Interconnected, Regardless of Citizenship
A Conversation About Blackness and Criminalization with Black Alliance for Just Immigration The politics of divide and conquer are as present as ever, and so how do we gather all that has happened already and take that technology that we...
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Materialization: A Reflection on Five Years of Worker Ownership at The Drivers Cooperative
The three installments of this series follow the first five years experience of The Drivers Cooperative. They will draw out insights that can be applied by other activists in our context today, where the left increasingly wields political power, but...
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Visible Power, Invisible Rights: Why Earning Progress Is Not Enough to Keep It
We examine how the 1898 Wilmington coup exposed the fatal illusion that electoral victories alone can secure lasting power when the ruling class retains control over violence, wealth, and the institutions that enforce both. As the United States marks its...
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How Domestic Workers built POWER in Philadelphia
How a worker-led coalition won Philadelphia’s POWER Act (the Protect Our Workers, Enforce Rights Act), and how they’re fighting to make it real. A few years ago, one of our members — a Black Caribbean immigrant nanny working in one...
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Beyond Democracy, Everyone Eats
In this conversation, Claire Maracle, Executive Director of Words of the People, and Baratunde Thurston, storyteller and author of How to Be Black, excavate the origins of American democracy to expand and reshape our political imagination. It turns out we’ve...
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Organizing as Ancestral Practice: Building Infrastructure for the Next Era of Movements
All social movements need infrastructure capable of sustaining across multi-generational fights. But how do we build this infrastructure and ensure that we lower the cost of onboarding new people into our movements so they can grow? As Judith LeBlanc, Executive...
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Repair in Practice: On Wealth Redistribution
Wealth redistribution, as a relational practice rooted in accountability, has the potential to spiritually transform a person, as shared here by redistribution organizers Brittany Koteles and Morgan Curtis. Koteles, Executive Director of Land Justice Futures, an organization that supports Catholic...
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Democracy and Decolonization: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Black and Indigenous Fight for Mino Bimaadiziwin
We are living in fascist times, which means we must remember history to help us understand the possibilities of our futures. Do we want to subjugate ourselves to the tyranny of a dictatorial leader? Or do we want to struggle...
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Braided Movements: Black & Indigenous Perspectives on Reclaiming Land
In a country where land has historically been central to wealth and power-building, we must carefully consider how we want to work together towards land reclamation. Kailea Loften in conversation with Nick Tilsen and Brea Baker At the start of...
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Reclaiming Power as a Practice to Get Free
The abolitionist movement transformed America from a slaveholders’ republic into a multiracial democracy in just decades, proving that organized people are the engine of real change. As America turns 250, social movements can look back on where we’ve been to...
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A New Politics of Togetherness: Rebuilding the Sacred Canopy
If we’re going to work to bring diverse groups of people into conversation and ultimately solidarity, we will need an updated politics of togetherness capable of bringing nuance to intersectionality. Trevor Smith in conversation with Amara Enyia and Scot Nakagawa...
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The Right To Wealth
Trevor Smith in conversation with Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya of The Maven Collaborative. The racial wealth gap is not a product of individual behavior but of policy design. Because of this, we must create new frameworks for wealth, inheritance,...
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Tending to Liberation
The American Dream was built on stolen land and enslaved labor, so true freedom means rejecting it and building a Liberation Economy rooted in repair and abundance. You and I will always sit at a crossroads, surveying our options at...
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The Legacy of Displacement: Reclaiming Borders & Solidarity across North America
The family policing system and the colonial legacy of the pass system, boarding schools, slave patrols, and immigration policies. Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color across North America know all too well how quickly civil rights and community safety...
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No Matter the Moment, You Organize: A Conversation on Responding to Disaster with Action St. Louis
The trauma of climate disaster, and the lack of state response and care, makes us hyper-individualized within this shared moment—but we have to be nimble enough to respond with a bigger strategy and to organize our people. Miski Noor: Kayla,...
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Being Pro-Working Class Isn’t Enough, We Need Victories People Can Feel
We must reclaim populism from process. Being pro-union, anti-billionaire, and pro-working class isn’t a sufficient economic vision for the scale of crisis we’re in. To win, the Left needs to prioritize promises and outcomes working people can feel. What a...
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A Love Letter and A Call to Women of Color Leaders
In the wake of backlash against racial equity in tech and intensifying authoritarianism, what can an Audre Lorde-inspired reading group teach us about the care practices necessary to turn grief and rage into collective power? For many of us, the...
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(Almost) Everyone is wrong: Reparations are possible
Every critic of reparations should know that it’s already been done. Back in 1862, America gave reparations, but they were given to the wrong people. President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Action Law, which offered reparations to...
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Returning Autonomy and Power to the People: The Case for People’s Assemblies
Introduction: More Than a Vote In the United States, democracy is often defined by the ballot box. Every two or four years, citizens are asked to cast votes for candidates who make promises to represent them. But what happens in...