This article aims to introduce Bell’s work to philosophical audiences while also presenting his work for consideration within our contemporary discussions of race and racism. Bell’s contributions to our understanding of race have gone largely unnoticed, and that those who consider themselves philosophers of race are unfamiliar with the contributions of the intellectual father of Critical Race Theory is not only a failure of intellectual scholarship, but it is also a missed opportunity to take seriously the claims of a legal, political, and philosophical titan. The first section of this paper seeks to present Bell’s paradigm of racial realism and its constituent components. The second section explores what has led to Bell’s near complete exclusion from the discipline of philosophy, and philosophy of race specifically. The third section addresses the contributions that Bell’s theories can make to our contemporary discussions of race within the discipline of philosophy.

Critical theory has recently charted the rise of an unprecedented wave of social acceleration transforming Western capitalism. Within that body of work, a tendency has emerged to frame this new temporality as a stable structure lacking in the possibility for visions of alternatives, let alone for substantive revolt or challenge. This essay argues that recent struggles like Occupy and 15-M experimented with an alternative, utopian temporality that challenged and disrupted acceleration, revealing the latter to be prone to generating and expanding the conditions of temporal struggle. Acceleration is therefore unstable, and cannot be adequately understood apart from its increasing cultivation of visions of and experiments in other temporalities.

In this essay I pay homage to one of the most important but neglected philosophers of liberation in Latin America, Luis Villoro, by considering what possible lessons we can learn from his philosophy about how to approach injustices in the Americas. Villoro was sympathetic to liberatory-leftist philosophies but he became concerned with the direction they took once they grew into philosophical movements centered on shared beliefs or on totalizing theories that presume global explanatory power. These movements became vulnerable to extremes or vices that undermine their liberatory promise. I examine some of these worrying tendencies among that body of literature roughly described as “decolonial thought” (e.g., Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo). After a concise presentation of Villoro and the decolonial turn, I consider four dangers that this new liberatory-leftist movement faces and why Villoro should be a significant voice as the decoloniality debate moves forward.

This paper argues that certain orientalist writings authorize the genocide of Arab peoples precisely by establishing the conditions for the impossibility of Arab death. Of particular import to this analysis is the nineteenth century philological work of famed orientalist Ernest Renan, who argues that Arabs are psychically inorganic because their language has never demonstrated the organic historical development characteristic of European peoples. The historico-logical impossibility of killing Arab peoples is essential not only if philosophers are going to grasp the rationale of the ongoing and often casual murder of Arabs, but also if scholars of race hope to comprehend the specificities of biopolitical racism, orientalizing racism, historical racism, animalizing racism, and so on.

This paper critically examines the ways in which dominant poly discourses position polyamorists among other queer and feminist-friendly practices while setting polygamists outside of those practices as the heteronormative and hyper-patriarchal antithesis to queer kinship. I begin by examining the interlocking liberal discourses of freedom, secularism and egalitarianism that frame the putative distinction between polyamory and polygamy. I then argue that the discursive antinomies of polyamory/polygamy demarcate a distinction that has greater affective resonance than logical validity—an affective resonance, moreover, that is built on neocolonial framings of polygamy as barbaric and idealizations of polyamory that whitewash its practices.

Mexico faces a crisis of national sovereignty and independence as it struggles to establish a democracy amidst integration into the world market system and internal demands for social justice. U.S. involvement in Mexican affairs, providing military training and equipment for government troops, contributes to a state-sponsored war against civilians, namely indigenous groups and the middle and lower classes devastated by NAFTA. While resistance movements in Chiapas respond to capitalist practices and repression, Valdez argues the Mexican government minimizes them to displace its indigenousgroups and facilitate their silent annihilation. U.S. policy, the Mexican state, indigenous issues, and free trade are interconnected with Mexico’s larger society.

With 5,000 convicts, most of them lifers, working soy, corn, and cotton crops, Angola’s “penal slavery” system today eerily recalls Louisiana’s past investment in the peculiar institution. Present-day form of discipline (chain gangs and striped uniforms) also indicate that dehumanization and popular vengeance are the selling points of a new punishment order. Using “America’s worst prison” as a case study, the author charts an archeology of the penal system in the U.S. South, arguing that prison revolts, and particularly the heelslinger revolution of 1951, have historically ushered in significant if short-lived improvements in the penal system, and that activists in the free world must heed them in their efforts to bring about prison reform.

In this address, Mumia Abu-Jamal argues that a sustained commitment to revolutionary activity is no accident, that it depends upon an initial and irrevocable choice to change intolerable social conditions. The individual who makes such a choice, Abu-Jamal recognizes, is often aware of the suffering that his or her decision may entail. Citing the deliberately led lives of several revolutionaries, including Huey Newton, John Brown, and Ramona Africa, the author hopes that young people will draw inspiration from these examples by understanding the importance and continued possibility of such a choice.

Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are criminal justice system’s primary targets, the author argues that the system still discriminates against women. Vtilizing postmodern scholarship, he argues that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating dominant norms of gender correctness.

The authors provide a concise analysis of the changing political economy of race, incarceration, political imprisonment, and execution in the U.S. criminal justice system. The article goes on to describe the circumstances surrounding the arrest, conviction, and impending execution of the black militant, Mumia Abu-Jamal. From here the discussion turns to an examination of the political efficacy of various boycott strategies and tactics, and, in closing, begins to outline a specific plan of action aimed at preventing Abu-Jamal’s execution.

Using analysis and anecdote, the author examines fifteen Puerto Rican political prisoners in the U.S. prison system and the disproportionate sentences for their actions to end U.S. colonial control over Puerto Rico. These prisoners, lacking prior felony convictions, received punitive, restrictive treatment by the U.S. justice system - despite monitoring by Amnesty International and lawsuits by attorneys. The manufacturing of sting operations to entrap prisoners in illegal activities; their isolation from families; the infliction of physical abuse and psychological torture; and the withholding of medical care, are strategically applied by U.S. courts and prisons to force the renunciation of their political beliefs.

Ever since it was annexed from northern Mexico in 1848, San Francisco has catered to tourists attracted to its good year-round weather, natural splendor, as well as its licentious entertainment industry and, since the 1950s, the buoyancy of its lesbian and gay community. The author looks at the growth and vibrancy of alternative lifestyles in San Francisco, arguing that the visibility of the queer community there is not the result of general tolerance in the Western outpost but, paradoxically, the outcome of a struggle between the lesbian, gay, and transgendered residents of the city and the repressive local, state, and federal agencies whose harassment of the alternative communities, culminating in the 1930s and 1940s in frequent bar-raids, arrests, and the “war on vice,” brought about the queer community’s politicization and grovving militancy.

Fascist, liberal democratic, or Marxist states are premised upon the violation of indigenous rights. If the transformation of U.S. society emerges where racism, sexism, ageism, militarism, classism, and corporatism are eradicated - what happens, the author asks, to the material and political rights of native peoples? Interrogating the objectives of progressive methodology and practice, which promotes liberatory rhetoric, but replicates a global colonialist system, the author calls for a nonindustrialized Fourth World. Debunking the three worlds paradigm establishes working models of decolonization,allowing the foundation of ecologically balanced socioeconomic and political organization.