Kevin Bi is a member of the Harvard College Open Data Project. Another unarmed Black man has been killed by the police. His name was George Floyd. The video of a police officer’s brazen cruelty and his utter disregard for the words “I can’t breathe” was shocking, but not new. In March, Breonna Taylor was shot … Read more
A ghostly San Francisco skyline appears in the distance. Light glares through it, and the buildings feel ethereal, leaving a brief impression of a city rather than something concrete. A VHS tape synth trumpets its arrival before fading into the haunting sound of distant strings. This is Tomorrow’s Harvest, the 2013 album by Scottish duo … Read more
Eden Fesseha, Zoë Hopkins and Ife Omidiran work with the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Advocacy. “Thank you all for the love. This matter is urgent. I have a timeline of April 30.” These were the final words in a letter written by Michael Mauney (aka Country) asking people to call the Massachusetts district … Read more
As I write this, civilians in dozens of American cities are mounting protests against police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd. Those who experience American society as a liberal democracy have taken these protests as an opportunity to pursue a favorite question: How would we survive without the police? The American liberal … Read more
The cover art for this article was created by Jane Li, a student at Harvard College, for the exclusive use of the HPR’s Red Line. In February 2019, illegal entry at the U.S.-Mexico border reached an 11-year high with 66,450 migrants apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol. According to the Pew Research Center, “people traveling in … Read more
The mayor of Los Angeles grasped for justification after imposing a curfew last weekend, declaring that “violence and vandalism hurts all.” Woven throughout his trite, state-sanctioned rhetoric is the basic assumption that force against property can be equated with state violence. However, violence against property is a farcical construction. You cannot suffocate a Target, starve … Read more
As I write, my Twitter account floods with notifications: protesters marching for Black lives in New York City are trapped on the Manhattan Bridge by NYPD on both sides, live-tweeting for help. I think of my friend’s Facebook Live stream of demonstrations in Washington DC, which captured the pandemonium of police and the National Guard … Read more
While Trump was busy hearkening back to segregationist-era maxims and militarising against the eruption of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s callous death, his foreign adversaries adopted a different tact. From Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted that “A human… has no reassurance to live in society, if…a police officer can beat him to … Read more
As COVID-19 rages through the United States, news coverage has focused on the immediate consequences of the pandemic. Networks have been saturated with articles about the need for ventilators, daily new case counts, and comparative descriptions of how — and how well — different countries around the world have handled the crisis. Individual profiles show … Read more
Rima el-Husseini is a lecturer in conflict, culture, and negotiation at the Lebanese American University, as well as a lawyer and mediator. She owns the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek, Lebanon, whose facade opens onto the resplendent Temples of Bacchus and Jupiter in the Roman Ruins of Baalbek. Now the oldest standing hotel in the region, … Read more