Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – This week marks another infamous anniversary in US history: the Chicago race riot of 1919. It started when white beachgoers threw rocks at Eugene Williams, a black teenager. He had drifted on a homemade raft from his neighborhood beach toward a white section of it, where a group pelted […]
The Real Trauma at the Border: Hundreds of Trump’s Separated Children Still can’t Find their Families
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – Media outlets consistently describe flight from Central America and Mexico as a “crisis,” suggesting that migrants’ proximity to our national space is a problem for us, not for them. Fleeing from violence back home and enduring possible assault on their journey here are often construed as threats to the […]
Columbus didn’t represent Italy, and he Killed and Enslaved Americans, and we Don’t need his Statues
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the removal of two statues of Christopher Columbus after police and protesters clashed last week. The confrontation at the navigator’s monument in Grant Park resulted in injuries to both officers and demonstrators. According to NBC News, Chicago Police Department officials confirmed that the gathering […]
No, Racism isn’t in the Past, and isn’t Rare or Aberrant: Stop Romanticizing
This painting by by Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910) is entitled “The Veteran in a New Field.” He painted it in 1865, not long after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Lee’s capitulation marked the end of the American Civil War (1861 – 1865) and the death of the […]
How the Trump Administration is Moving us Closer to Nuclear Midnight
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, saw something shocking on his computer. The United States had launched a nuclear missile, and it was heading toward Moscow. Petrov said that he “just sat there for a few seconds, staring at … the screen […]
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek thinks Trump is in a Perverse Way good For U.S.; Americans Disagree
Says Backing Trump Is Right. Most Americans Would Disagree