Aaron Cantú

Editor’s Note: Originally published at BeaconReader.com. Reprinted here with permission of the author. OVERVIEW The New York Times ran a story that pitted an oil terminal against a real estate project in Vancouver, Washington. The reporter did not mention anything about the people who would be displaced by both. *** I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s […]

“After 9/11, the word ‘homeland’ took the country by surprise,” writes Todd Miller in the pages of his new book Border Patrol Nation. Furthermore, the notion of an American “homeland” materialized into our public psyche at just the exact moment when the country seemed to be at its most vulnerable. The main effect of that […]

On the eve of World War II, the Nazis began to describe the European Jews as “Untermenschen.” The word literally means “subhumans”—a creature that resembles a person, but is nevertheless a bestial humanoid aberration. This was a way to dehumanize them in preparation for a statewide programm of mass extermination. Since the Holocaust, scholars have […]

Latino leaders must begin leveraging their power to speak out against widespread imprisonment It is 2013, over 40 years after President Nixon launched the War on Drugs in response to conservative demands for “law and order” in the post-Civil Rights era. Every president since has intensified the government’s war efforts, enlisting Congress, the judiciary, and […]