The Future is Another Country
Lange’s photographs can be considered “care work,” the devalued labor, integral to maintaining human life. By identifying the distress of migrant laborers’ lives, Lange indicated where care had lapsed.
The Activist History Review invites proposals for our May 2019 issue, “Recovering Queer Histories in Unexpected Places.”
“I see my duty as an activist-historian to also uplift the voices of other activist-historians who may not be traditional historians, but are doing essential historical work, by highlighting their historical-activism on any platform available and joining them in direct action whenever possible.”
Maybe, through protest, we can create a government that acts on its own for justice. Maybe, through protest, we can make protest obsolete. Maybe.
Activists have applied political pressure most effectively on the state and local levels. The fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s provides a historical roadmap for embracing formal politics as a means toward activist ends in the United States.
Recent efforts to weaken both public education and the Voting Rights Act show that it is time to try again.
While Democrats are, at best, a corporate-dominated center-left party with a history of attacking its left flank, they represent the only viable alternative to the far right Republican agenda. Supporting Democrats, given the alternative, is important. After all, Democrats are the only other political party with real power in a system designed to accommodate the existence of only two parties.
The messy realities of the past rarely make for the pithiest of signs. And the reality of private gun ownership in the United States is not that it enjoys the support of an eighteenth-century amendment, but that it enjoys the support of twenty-first-century legislative and judicial interpretations of that amendment.
Moms Demand Action models itself after Mothers Against Drunk Driving. But to claim an inheritance from MADD is to also lay claim to their particular white suburban praxis, where the theoretically race-neutral title of “mother” works to mobilize women around the deaths of white children.
The Activist History Review invites proposals for its annual conference on June 16, 2018, organized around the theme of power.
