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Connexions Resource Centre
Focus on Race, Caste, Ethnicity, Racism, Multiculturalism, Identity Politics

Recent & Selected Articles

  1. This is a small sampling of articles related to education and children in the Connexions Online Library. For more articles, books, films, and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as education, children, youth, post-secondary education, film, and schools.
  1. African Americans Ignored in the Age of Obama (January 1, 2013)
    A truly equal and diverse United States is not possible unless all Americans come to grips with the origins of the race issue, its centrality to U.S. politics, and why African-American issues must be central to revitalizing the civil rights and labour movements — which also requires rebuilding the dream for full equality by direct action.
  2. Adivasi Movements in India: An Interview with Poet Waharu Sonavane (October 5, 2012)
    Waharu is a Bhil Adivasi, long-time poet and activist. Since the 1970s, he has been organizing for Adivasi self-sufficiency among his community near his hometown in western India.
  3. Why Opposing Islamophobia is not a Defense of Extremism (October 3, 2012)
    Recent events have generated a lot of debate about Islam, Muslims, free speech and Islamophobia. Unfortunately, much of that debate has fallen back upon rather tired arguments about not only what "Muslims are like" but also how those who oppose Islamophobia are somehow defending repression or appeasing extremists.
  4. Islamophobia, Left and Right (September 18, 2012)
    Should Muslims be worried about rising Islamophobia? Of course they should! Anti-Islam bigotry is becoming a key element of the revival of the far Right – a Right that doesn’t merely slander Muslims but also takes action against them.
  5. Slavery still shackles Mauritania, 31 years after its abolition (August 14, 2012)
    Rigid caste system and ruling elite have enabled a centuries-old practice to continue into the 21st century.
  6. Racist Violence is Used to Maintain an Unjust Social Order (March 23, 2012)
    While it would be gratifying and is socially necessary to bring Trayvon’s murderer to justice, the continuation of America’s system of racial oppression must also be ended or we just wait for the inevitable next wrongfully murdered black youth.
  7. Complicating “White Privilege” (December 30, 2011)
  8. Connexions Archive Case Statement (September 24, 2011)
    Working together to secure a future for the past
  9. The origins of racism (July 5, 2011)
    Racism is so embedded in our society that many people assume it has always existed. But, says Yuri Prasad, it is really a modern phenomenon that developed with capitalism.
  10. The 60-Year Unemployment Scandal (July 5, 2011)
    Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites.
  11. Murfreesboro vs. Islamophobia (January 1, 2011)
    When the Muslim community in Murfreesboro, Tennessee sought a permit to build an expanded Islamic Center, local bigots saw an opportunity to exploit the same “moral panic,” invented by the Tea Party, the Christian Right and much of the corporate media, that would also emerge in New York around the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.”
  12. Dividing the Races to Benefit the Rich (December 24, 2010)
    Race baiting broadcast agitators like Beck and Rush Limbaugh have their audiences believing the factually flawed foolishness that the reason they are falling behind economically is because the federal government is fawning over blacks lavishing them with unearned benefits. The reason for the loss of jobs, homes and dreams of comfortable futures driving white working class (and middle class) ire is not benefits to blacks but naked greed on Wall Street and in the suites of mega-corporations that triggered America's economic collapse.
  13. Race and Class: What About the Working Poor? (November 1, 2010)
    One striking feature of political debate in the country today is that — while every commentator, pundit and political observer talks about and focuses on the concerns of the super-rich and the middle class — few ever talk about the plight of the disadvantaged, those on food stamps and welfare and particularly the working poor.
  14. How Race Fuels Rightist Agenda (September 1, 2010)
    Nearly 50 years after the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, the conservative movement is mobilizing its electoral base by using the wedge issues of race and racism. The principal targets are not new — African Americans and “illegal immigrants” from Mexico.
  15. Revered Rabbi Preaches Slaughter Of Gentile Babies (August 2, 2010)
    Rabbis who are among the leading idelogues of the growing fascist movement in Israel say that violence against non-Jews, including the killing of babies, is justied by religious law. According to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, Jewish law permits the killing of non-Jews in a wide variety of circumstances. In a recent boo, they say #There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us".
  16. Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System (July 26, 2010)
    The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
  17. The Global War on Tribes (April 13, 2010)
    The point is not that all tribal peoples pose an egalitarian alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Some (such as Indigenous peoples) certainly do have strong egalitarian principles, but many other tribal peoples -- such as in the new conflict zones -- certainly do not (particularly toward women). The salient point is not that all tribal cultures are paradise, but that they are not capitalist, and neoliberal capitalism cannot stand anything other than Total Control.
  18. SNCC at 50 (April 13, 2010)
    The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is vitally important not just for learning and understanding the past but, more importantly, for imagining and working for a more righteous future.
  19. Martin Kramer, Harvard and the Eugenics of Zion (April 12, 2010)
    At Herzliya the cream of the Zionist security elite gather to raise the alarm about Arab births and hear scholarly analyses of family size and fertility rates among Jews and Arabs as 'existential' threats to the State. Meanwhile, in the Israeli Knesset there are elaborate debates on how to define who is a Jew and who is not - along with legislating what extra privileges should be allocated to the former and denied to the latter. It would be hard to imagine another modern country where such discussions are part of the intellectual mainstream, rather than isolated in the more shadowy fringes of racist right-wing politics. Similar attitudes are expressed in the Zionist Diaspora, where bemoaning Jewish assimilation, promoting Jewish childbearing and financing Aliya to strengthen Israel#s Jewish demography are common themes. Early eugenicists (and their successors) once warned against 'miscegenation' and 'mongrelization' as a danger to the White Aryan Race. Today, Jewish charities like the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation announce their prime mission as education against 'intermarriage.'
  20. Hospital pays compensation over 'racism' death (March 31, 2010)
    Harinder Veriah's death helped to expose an ugly truth in Hong Kong: that racism is a serious problem. A report "Hong Kong's big dirty little secret" acknowledged that racism was so ingrained that derogatory terms for ethnic minorities such as gwei lo ("ghost people") for whites and hak gwai or ("black ghost") for blacks were barely noticed.
  21. Black Liberation and the Fight for a Socialist America (March 26, 2010)
    From slavery to convict labour, from the chain gang to the assembly line, American capitalism has been built upon the lash-scarred backs of black labour. Any organization that claims a revolutionary perspective for the United States must confront the special oppression of black people#their forced segregation at the bottom of capitalist society and the poisonous racism that divides the working class and cripples its struggles.
  22. Racism (January 12, 2010)
    An overview of racism
  23. Tactics of desperation: Using false accusations of 'anti-semitism' as a weapon to silence criticism of Israel's behaviour (December 27, 2009)
    The Israeli state and its defenders are increasingly attempting to silence critics because they are losing the battle for public opinion.
  24. Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea (November 29, 2009)
    Across South Korea hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas. Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them. South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.
  25. Connexions Archive seeks a new home (November 18, 2009)
    The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
  26. Feeling Racism (October 26, 2009)
    I have found that when a person has faced racism and discrimination, he can never forget it, it stays with him always. Seeing my mother treated with such disrespect and rudeness, only because of her race, was worse than being discriminated against myself. It burned into my soul, and it will never go away.
  27. Fearsome Words? (October 14, 2009)
    We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival.
  28. Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews (September 7, 2009)
    The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.
  29. The limits of anti-racism (September 1, 2009)
    The contemporary discourse of 'antiracism' is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality -- whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of 'racism' -- over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither 'overcoming racism' nor 'rejecting whiteness' qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the 'revolution' or urging God's heavenly intervention.
  30. Israeli Rabbis Ban Marriage For Jewish 'Untouchables' (August 7, 2009)
    New immigrants to Israel from Russia with inadequate documentation have found themselves on a collision course with Israel's Orthodox rabbis, who regard themselves as guarding the Jewish people's ethnic and religious purity.

Selected Websites and Organizations

  1. This is a small sampling of organizations and websites concerned with education and children in the Connexions Directory. For more organizations and websites, check the Connexions Directory Subject Index, especially under topics such as education, children, youth, post-secondary education, film, and schools.
  • Malik, Kenan
    Website and blog of Kenan Malik, featuring articles on race, identity, multiculturalism, diversity, and censorship.

Other Links & Resources



Books, Films and Periodicals

  1. This is a small sampling of books related to education and children in the Connexions Online Library. For more books and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as education, children, youth, post-secondary education, film, and schools.

  1. Beyond Chutzpah
    On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
    Author: Finkelstein, Norman
    A meticulously researched expose of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Bringing to bear the latest findings on the conflict and recasting the scholarly debate, Finkelstein points to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record. Why, then, does so much controversy swirl around the conflict? Finkelstein's answer, copiously documented, is that apologists for Israel contrive controversy. Whenever Israel comes under international pressure, another media campaign alleging a global outbreak of anti-Semitism is mounted.
  2. Black or White? The origins of racism
    New Internationalist March 1985
    A discussion of racism as a white problem, including articles on South Africa, New Zealand, mixed-race families and multi-culturalism. The issue looks back at the history of racism, and to the future with suggestions for anti-racist action.
  3. Bridges of Power
    Women's Multicultual Alliances
    Author: Albrecht, Lisa; Bremer, Rose
    Exploring the cultural sources of women's leadership this book views the processes and results that are possible when women come together to overcome not only gender based inequality but oppression based on race and class.
  4. Class Notes
    Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
    Author: Reed, Adolph L.
    Reed argues against the solipsistic approaches of cultural or identity politics, and in favor of class-based political interpretation and action. Class Notes moves on to tackle race relations, ethnic studies, family values, welfare reform, the so-called underclass, and black public intellectuals.
  5. Combatting Caste
    New Internationalist July 2005
    A look at the caste system in South Asia and Africa. Discussion of the Dalit system in India.
  6. Combatting Racism in the Workplace
    A Course for Workers
    Author: Thomas, Barb; Novogrodsky, Charles
  7. The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism
    Author: Perlman, Fredy
  8. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
    Author: Pappe, Ilan
    Israel historian Ilan Pappe recounts the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians from Israel during the war of 1948.
  9. Facing West: the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building
    Author: Drinnon, Richard
    From John Endicott's war on the Niantics and Pequots, to the horrors of the My Lai massacre, Drinnon illustrates how Indian-hating in the Americas became a national pastime, and how that same hate was turned against the native populations of the Phillipines and Southeast Asia.
  10. Filtering People
    Understanding and Confronting Our Prejudices
    Author: Cole, Jim (with a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
    A tool for workshops, courses and personal reflection to identify our prejudices and learn how to overcome them so that we can see each other as we are in all our diversity.
  11. From Fatwa to Jihad
    The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy
    Author: Malik, Kenan
    Tells the story both of the Rushdie affair and of its transformative impact on cultural and political landscape of the West. The book explores the issues that the Rushide affair raised. in particular the questions of muliculturalism, radical Islam and free speech, and shows how in responding to these issues Western liberals have betrayed the fundamental beliefs of liberalism.
  12. The Gulf Within: Canadian Arabs, Racism, & The Gulf War
    Author: Kashmeri, Zuhair
    The Gulf Within documents the experiences of Arab and Muslim Canadians during the Gulf War. It's about the subtle and not-so-subtle anger and distrust other Canadians and institutions demonstrated towards these groups.
  13. If I Am Not For Myself
    Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew
    Author: Marqusee, Mike
    In a journey through family memory and leftwing history, Marqusee introduces us to Jewish heretics and heroes. In proudly reclaiming the Jewish radical tradition, he reminds us that cultures are not the exclusive franchises of nation-states, and that Zionists and anti-semites share the same sinister, racialized concept of group identity.
  14. The Invention of the Jewish People
    Author: Sand, Shlomo
    In this new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times # when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation.
  15. The Invention of the White Race
    Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control
    Author: Allen, Theodore W
    One of the great contributions of Allen's study is a complete debunking of the myth that race and skin colour are the same thing.
  16. The Invention of the White Race
    Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America
    Author: Allen, Theodore W.
    Argues that the propertyless classes in continental Anglo-American and United States society have been recruited into the "intermediate buffer control stratum" (the so-called "middle class") through anomalous white-skin privileges.
  17. Judeophobia: The scourge of antisemitism
    New Internationalist October 2004 - #372
    A look at the history of antisemitism and the fight against it.
  18. Man, Beast and Zombie
    What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature
    Author: Malik, Kenan
    Drawing upon the ideas of evolutionary biology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, Malik questions many of our assumptions about human nature.
  19. The Meaning of Race
    Race History and Culture in Western Society
    Author: Malik, Kenan
    The Meaning of Race has two key themes. First it explores the intellectual and philosophical basis of racial thinking, examining the origins and development of the concept of race from the Enlightenment to the present day. Second, it also looks at the way in which recent social and political developments - such as the end of the Cold War, the erosion of the postwar liberal consensus, and the demise of the left - have shaped our ideas about race.
    The book argues that much of contemporary antiracism is rooted in the same anti-humanist philosophies of human differences that gave rise to the idea of race in the first place. Only a philosophy based on a universalist and humanist outlook, I suggest, can hope to transcend the discourse of race.
  20. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
    Author: Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson
    Robinson recounts the origins and sustaining force of the famous boycott led by Montgomery's African American women.
  21. The National Question
    Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg
    Author: Luxemburg, Rosa (edited by Davis, Horace B.)
    In her penetrating analysis of nationalism, Rosa Luxemburg argues that the formula of "the right of nations to self-determination" is essentially not a political or programmatic guide to the nationality question, but only a means of avoiding that question.
  22. The Nazi Connection
    Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism
    Author: Kuhl, Stefan
    This book shows the eugenic/racist connections between Nazi Germany and the US. Responsibility for the holocaust extends beyond Germany.
  23. The New Jim Crow
    Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
    Author: Alexander, Michelle
    Argues that Jim Crow and legal racial segregation have been replaced by mass race-based incarceration as a system of social control.
  24. The No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste & Hierarchies
    Author: Seabrook, Jeremy
    Concentrates mainly on the history of social hierarchy in Western civilization, and particularly the struggles of the working class.
  25. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration
    Author: Stalker, Peter
  26. The Other
    Author: Kapuscinski, Ryszard
    The Other is made up of a series of lectures that Kapuscinski delivered in Austria and in Poland, eloquent speeches in which he considers the history, the present and the future of our relationship with the Other, a term he employs to distinguish Europeans from "non-Europeans, or non-whites -- while fully aware for the latter, the former are just as much 'Others'."
  27. The Politics Of Anti-Semitism
    Author: Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey (eds.)
    How did a term, once used accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of Palestinians? This is the question considered in these 18 essays (by nine Jews and nine Gentiles), including Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Norman Finkelstein, Lenni Brenner, and Uri Avnery.
  28. Prison Nation
    The Warehousing of America's Poor
    Author: Herivel, Tara; Wright, Paul
    Essays on the cruelty and inhumanity of the American prison system.
  29. Race, Incarceration, and American Values
    Author: Loury, Glenn C., with Pamela Karlan, Tommie Shelby and Loïc Wacquant
    Glenn Loury argues that the extraordinary mass incarceration rate in the USA is not a response to rising crime rates. Instead, it is the product of a decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies.
  30. Slavery by Another Name
    The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
    Author: Blackmon, Douglas A.
    An account of how African Americans were forcibly enslaved by a corrupt legal system in the southern States, from the end of the Civil War through WWII.
  31. The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s
    Author: Aguilar-San Juan, Karin
    Aguilar-San Juan offers a complex understanding of race and racial identity, and a critique of the narrow identity politics -- defined as "ethnic consciousness". She writes, "Identity politics -- while they have created occasional possibilities for dark-skinned individuals to move up the socioeconomic ladder -- unfortunately have seduced many people into putting their identity issues at the center of the debate, while shunning the more substantive issues of racism and class oppression.... Reducing race to a matter of identity, rather than expanding our experience of racism into a critique of U.S. society, is detrimental to our movement. In the Asian American community, we often make the dangerous mistake of equating the process of acquainting ourselves with our ethnic, linguistic, religious, or historic roots with activism against racism. If in our desire to claim our identity, we overlook, for example, the ways that race is connected to imperialism . . . then we hover perilously close to the trap of defining race as a biological rather than a social construct."
  32. Strange Fruit
    Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
    Author: Malik, Kenan
    Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
  33. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness
    Author: Roediger, David
    Roediger's genda is to show how race consciousness among whites needs to be fought so that the working class can be brought to an emancipatory agenda.
  34. The Trouble with Diversity
    How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
    Author: Michaels, Walter Benn
    Argues that a focus on cultural diversity at the expense of economic equality has stunted resistance to neoliberalism.
  35. The Wages of Whiteness
    Race and the Making of the American Working Class
    Author: Roediger, David
    A book that has reoriented how historians look at the American working class.
  36. 'Worse than Slavery': Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
    Author: Oshinsky, David M.
    After the abolition of slavery the white rulers of Mississippi developed a new system for keeping the ex-slaves in line: laws were passed to maintain white supremacy, including the system of convict leasing, a system whereby people could "hire" prisoners for physical labour outside the walls of prison.


Learning from our History

Coming soon





Resources for Activists

The Connexions Calendar - An event calendar for activists.

Media Names & Numbers - A comprehensive directory of Canada's print and broadcast media. (CX5857).

Sources - A directory that enables journalists to find spokespersons of organizations. Organizations that list themselves in Sources signficantly increase their odds of getting called by reporters when they are doing a story of their issues..