Portside

Successful social movements rarely travel along a linear route toward victory, or a fast one. Even with new digital media, organizing for change requires all the old virtues.

This new book reminds us of the scope and power of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, beginning a century ago. As reviewer Scott McLemee points out, however, to only point out the Klan's racist heritage can be deceptively simplistic. McLemee reminds us that what made the Klan a mass force in the 1920s was that the movement's reactionary politics and racist passions "were widespread enough to count as mainstream.'

We do not know when or if the DACA program will be terminated. Here's what you need to know if it does.

Recent lawsuits claim the agency is targeting people for deportation based on spurious allegations of gang connections.

A new video from Equal Justice Initiative argues we need more memorials devoted to remembering racial violence.

“If the president pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.”

A year after racial discontent neared levels not seen since the Rodney King beating case, the country finds itself convulsed by controversies over neo-Nazis emboldened by Donald Trump’s rise to power. Now, a burst of new films, many of them documentaries, are taking a deep look beyond the headlines at the lasting impact that racial schisms and racism have on Americans’ everyday lives.

The truth shall make you a target; Arpaio’s Buchenwald; Bye bye Big Biz?; Texas turnabout; Black hat backlash; Teen Vogue throws down

To pardon a public official who refuses to obey the law (especially a direct court order) is to give the finger to the judiciary, and thus our constitutional order. It encourages further lawlessness. It unleashes bias, hate, vigilantism, mob rule. And it hits where the rubber meets the street.

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.