Semester starts tomorrow, so get some links while you can:

• Against Students Stories.
• Struggle and Progress, an interview with Eric Foner.
• Stop Universities from Hoarding Money.
• Hannibal Directive and the Economy of Lives: Making Sense of “Black Friday” in Gaza.
• New Orleans West, on Houston a decade after Katrina.
• Slow Poison:

If stopped by the police, I thought to myself, I would set my phone to record audio and put it on the passenger seat. I would send a tweet that I was being stopped and had every intention of complying with the police officer. I would turn on Periscope and livestream the stop, crowdsourcing witnesses. I would text my family and tell them that I was not feeling angry or suicidal, that I was looking forward to seeing them soon. There would not be time to do all of these things, but maybe if I prepared in advance I could pull off one or two of them. What all of these plans had in common were that none of them were meant to secure my safety, but rather to ensure that my death looked suspicious enough to question.

I was figuring out how to enter evidence into the inquiry of my own death.

[…]

Most of us will not be killed by police officers. White supremacy will not kill us so directly, so flagrantly. Instead it dogs our steps, wages niggling wars on our peace itself. Its power is in the daily theft of our joy, our dignity, our sanity. It is in the way we always have to weigh and calculate, how we can never assume good intentions and honest mistakes. Because it is always there, in swirling eddies around our ankles, waiting to drag us under.

• The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover.
• The Cure Culture.
• Environmentalism’s Racist History.
• Prose Poems to Cat Callers and Street Harassers.
• How Companies Make Millions Off of Lead-Poisoned Poor Blacks.
• Hurricane Katrina: Where Black Lives Matter Began:

White Americans saw the storm and its aftermath as a case of bad luck and unprecedented incompetence that spread its pain across the Gulf Coast regardless of race. This is the narrative you see in Landrieu’s words and, to some extent, Obama’s as well. To black Americans, however, this wasn’t an equal opportunity disaster. To them, it was confirmation of America’s indifference to black life. “We have an amazing tolerance for black pain,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson in an interview after the storm. Rev. Al Sharpton, also echoed the mood among many black Americans: “I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.” Even more blunt was rapper Kanye West, who famously told a live national television audience that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

[…]

When we look at the first 15 years of the 21^st century, the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country isn’t Election Day 2008; it’s Hurricane Katrina. The events of the storm and its aftermath sparked a profound shift among black Americans toward racial pessimism that persists to today, even with Barack Obama in the White House. Black collective memory of Hurricane Katrina, as much as anything else, informs the present movement against police violence, “Black Lives Matter.”

• Customer Service from Kimball’s Tenured Radicals.
• Phantoms Playing Double Dutch: The Fight for Dyett is Bigger Than One Chicago School Closing.
• What’s Really at Stake When a School Closes? On Queens’ Jamaica High School.
• Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders, a Dialogue.