The Atlantic is a rag that has made itself a safe and welcoming space for neoliberal blood gobblers like David Frum (whom I hate), but this is a rare great article worth reading (it's not by Frum. Fuck him).

The gist is that the neoliberal economic consensus on wage increases is flat fucking wrong. Labor is not a commodity, and it doesn't respond to the rules of supply and demand even though economists continue to insist it should. Everywhere we have tried minimum wage increases, they have worked. Job losses have been minimal or nonexistent, material conditions have improved, productivity has improved. The concept of fairness being at odds with growth has been beaten to death with data and yet it refuses to die. Arm yourself with knowledge and demand wages that make your employer cry.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/minimum-wage-experiment-worked/687255/

Strangers Teach Girl How to Jump Rope

#blackwomen #92percent #blackmastodon

It's hitting me how the slow arc of justice my elders fought and died to set in motion has been halted by the Calais decision.

This morning, I was on a call with another (highly accomplished) middle-aged Black women and this is how we processed it together:

We are realizing that we (including our younger elder millennial sisters) are likely to be the LAST generation of Black women who will achieve so much.

This decision is not just a gutting of the VRA but the highest court's massive rejection of the idea that this country is, indeed, a land of opportunity for everyone.

The court is now an overt and explicitly complicit engine of white nationalism.

THAT is how much anti-Blackness has been simmering underneath this facade of 'American democracy.'

So now, Black folks, we need to decide. Retreat, close ranks to protect our own, and/or fight for a renewed Reconstruction on top of the smoldering ruins of this gotdamn system?

#BlackMastodon
#BlackFedi
#SCOTUS
#CivilRights
#BlackHistoryEveryDay

Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember the Orangeburg Massacre, which occurred on February 8, 1968 in South Carolina, when highway patrolmen opened fire on black student protesters from South Carolina State, who were trying to integrate a bowling alley. They killed 3 African American students and wounded 33. These were the first student demonstrators killed by the police in the 1960s. 2 days prior, students held a sit-in at the bowling alley. When the police arrested them, hundreds of students arrived from Claflin College and South Carolina State to protest the arrests. As tensions grew, the governor called out the National Guard and Highway Patrol to “keep the order.” 9 cops were charged with deprivation of rights under color of law, but all were acquitted. But one of the student protestors, Cleveland Sellers, was convicted of several riot charges. In 1960, students and others marched through Orangeberg to protest segregation. Police and firefighters attacked them. They arrested 400 and imprisoned them in outdoors in a cattle stockade.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #orangeburg #massacre #racism #jimcrow #africanamerican #civilrights #police #policebrutality #students #protest #blackhistorymonth #BlackMastodon