What Gets Passed Down
This piece tells a story of rural Southern Missouri through the forms of knowledge inherited when the state offers nothing: no direction, no infrastructure, no recognition. The author is from Douglas County, where his family still hunts and welds and buries its dead. Electricity came late. Broadband still hasnโt come at all. Seth comes from the Western Cherokee Nation of Arkansas and Missouri, a tribe erased not just by settler removal but by federal recognition itself.
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Since When Has Working Been a Crime?
This article by Dave Ranney was originally publishedย in Hard Crackers on February 4th. It is even more timely now. In the months since, Trump’s immigration police forces have stepped up their targeting of undocumented workers in workplaces. It is essential that we focus our efforts on building a broad working-class resistance to all attacks on workers, includingย those that are undocumented
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An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education
Interview with esteemed labor historian David Roediger about his memoir, An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education.
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The Return of the Magonista?–Los Angeles and Borderland Revolt
This article was written in the days immediately following June 6th. The author was not able to participate in the street movement due to geographical distance from Los Angeles. ConquestIn August of 1846, US troops under Stephen Kearney occupied Santa Fe without firing a shot. In January of 1847, a combined force of Hispano and …
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Dancing for FDR: How My Father Met My Mother (and Vice Versa)
A key drama at the heart of all our personal origin stories is the saga of how our parents met. Iโve known the basics of this piece of my family history as long as I can remember. My mom and dad met, so the story went, when they were paired as dance partners performing in …
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The Karen Effect:ย A Cop Town’s Reckoning with Police Power
Americaโs latest referendum on police power is coming from an unlikely place: Canton, Massachusetts, a mostly white upper middle class and pro-police suburb located just fifteen miles outside of Boston. Jury deliberations began this week in the second murder trial of Karen Read, who is accused of killing her cop boyfriend. For the past three years, the case has divided Canton, with a significant number of residents convinced that Read is being framed by the police and the wealthy local families with ties to them. While the case has all the elements of a true-crime saga, its significance lies in that it is shedding a light on the deepening crisis of police legitimacy among white Americans. In addition, it is also revealing–yet again–the pernicious effects of whiteness, as seen by the inability or unwillingness of Karen Read supporters to connect her fight against a corrupt police and legal system to the current anti-ICE/police uprising.
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From the Archives
Stick-up on Rikers Island
It started with the phones. A few minutes before 9:30 on Saturday morning, mid-conversation with wives, children, friends, and lawyers, the lines all went dead. This was March 22nd. Visits had been suspended a week prior, so the phones had become our only real link to the outside world. Of course, the underlying frustration had …
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Plowshares into Swords: John Brown and the Poet of Rage: An Appreciation of the Work of Russell Banks
The novelist Russell Banks died on January 7, 2023. We are publishing this appreciation of his work by Beth Henson that first appeared in Race Traitor #10 (Winter, 1999).ย Beth does a wonderful job describing Russell Banksโs โvoyagesโ through the discontents of peopleโs daily lives. The Hard Crackers editors are especially thankful to Beth for agreeing …
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