Paul Street

This article was originally published in Znet. I doubt that many readers of Black Commentator will be shocked to hear that ABC television’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” show does not provide an especially incisive or critical take on United States history and current events. Still, I found two comments Kimmel made during his Monday, May 1st…

“One of the most important, though most subtle and elusive, aspects of white supremacy,” notes the radical black philosopher Charles W. Mills, “is the barrier it erects to a fair hearing. It is not merely,” Mills adds, “that people of color are trying to make a case for the economic and juridico-political injustice of their…

This article originally appeared in Znet. One of the many disturbing characteristics of dominant American ideology is the way it deletes radical-democratic beliefs from the official memory of certain acknowledged great historical personalities. How many Americans know that the celebrated scientist Albert Einstein (voted the “Man of the 20th Century” by Time Magazine) was a…

A shortened version of these comments were delivered in a televised lecture to the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy, Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 12, 2005. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.,…

The Personal and the Structural The brilliant and prolific left sociologist C. Wright Mills once said that the core purpose of meaningful analytical work on social and political affairs was to make relevant connections between individual pain and structural inequality. The point of such work, by Mills’ reckoning, was to de-atomize personal difficulty and relate…

A shorter version of these comments was delivered at the South Side headquarters of the Chicago Urban League on June 21, 2005, in connection with the public release of Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, 2005). Forty years ago, the great social justice…

Driving around in my car with Chicago’s WBBM News Radio (780 AM) recently, I got to hear two guttural syllables from the mouth of Fidel Castro. The full word and the Spanish language he was speaking were unintelligible. “That was Fidel Castro speaking to a throng in Havana, Cuba yesterday,” the robotic corporate newscaster reported.…

American empire and inequality both feed and reflect savagely selective moral concerns. Dominant United States media and policymakers express apprehension about the dangerous prospect of “nuclear weapons in the Middle East.” By this they mean the prospect that Iran might be able to develop one or two such weapons at some point in the future.…