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Category: Politics and Current Events

  • When College Graduates Participate in a White Supremacist Riot

    By Leigh Patel | Jim Clyburn, Congressional representative from South Carolina and the majority whip, has an office in the Congressional Chambers, with his name title displayed clearly. However, Clyburn does not work out of that office, instead working from an unmarked office with this staff. On January 6, the day of the storming of…

  • Recovering from the Last Four Years of Abuse

    By Marilyn Sewell | At last, it’s over! I mean the last four years of suffering from an abusive relationship—with our former president. Why am I not alive with energy, ready to get back to my writing? Wanting to Zoom with friends? Pushing ever harder with my climate activism? I find that I’m simply exhausted,…

  • Alondra Nelson Boldly Goes to Join President Biden’s Science Team

    “Science and technology have permeated nearly every aspect of our lives throughout the course of human history. But perhaps, never before in living memory, have the connections between our scientific world and our social world been quite so stark as they are today. . . . As new technologies take root in our lives, from…

  • Beacon Press Authors Voice Their Hopes to Biden and Harris on Inauguration Day

    After living through four years of an endless horror franchise, Joseph Biden gets sworn in today as commander in chief. Kamala Harris, in a historic moment for the US, gets sworn in as the first woman of color Vice President. And they have so much wreckage laying before them. No easy reset button will fix…

  • Thoughts Before an Invasion

    By J. A. Mills | I’ve lived in Washington, DC, for twenty years, but I’ve only been inside the US Capitol a handful of times. For meetings, hearings, and receptions related to protecting wild tigers, rhinos, and bears. I love this city for her vast green areas and restrictions on building height that bring attention…

  • Can Trump Pardon Himself?

    By David R. Dow | According to reporting from Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, President Trump was already exploring the possibility of pardoning himself, even before a riotous mob incited by Trump’s tweets and baseless charges of a stolen election stormed and defiled the US Capitol on Wednesday, January…

  • Beacon Press Authors Speak Out Against the Insurrection at the Capitol

    New Year, New Attempted Coup. Just as we were celebrating the triumphant results of the Georgia runoff election, the insurrection at the Capitol began. And we looked on with anger and weariness. Not disbelief, though. Less than a month before his Twitter account was suspended, the tyrant in chief rallied a mob of low-bar Civil…

  • Resisting Amazon Is Not Futile

    By Jonathan Rosenblum | It seems eons ago, the youth-led climate strike of September 20, 2019 that brought four million people onto the streets worldwide. I was on the sidewalk outside Seattle City Hall, watching thousands of school-skippers march by. And then behind the teens came waves of exuberant people, no more than a decade or…

  • Welcome to Oaxacalifornia, Where Interpreters of Indigenous Languages Are Hard to Find

    By Eileen Truax | “Good afternoon, Senator Sanders. My name is Odilia Romero, Indigenous Bene Xhon.” Standing onstage at the Casa del Mexicano in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in east Los Angeles, Odilia holds a microphone in one hand and in the other her speech for Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic Party’s…

  • What Alexis de Tocqueville Told Us About Democracy and the Future of Black and Native Americans

    By Kyle T. Mays | African Americans and Native Americans in urban districts and on reservations were major reasons why Joe Biden won the presidency. To be sure, Trump’s disastrous handling of the Coronavirus and racism were fundamental reasons why people voted him out. But the people in Detroit, Philadelphia, the Navajo Nation, and other…