Doctors pledge to do no harm. So, as a genocide takes place before our very eyes, the silence of our medical institutions has led to widespread disgust and shame on the part of medical students, residents, and attending physicians. As medical students, many of us got into this field with the same goal: to help people. However, watching this blatant hypocrisy from the institutions and individuals that I would otherwise respect is horrifying.

One of the lessons people might have incorrectly drawn from the 2020 uprising around racial justice in the United States was that it was spurred by a sharp, rapid increase in police violence directed toward Black people. Protesters around the globe were attributing the murder of George Floyd, while technically at the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin, to the entire Minneapolis Police Department and, more widely, to a system of policing that allows the police to enact violence on the communities they’ve sworn to protect and serve. The video of the killing, courageously recorded by a 17-year-old woman, showed millions of Americans what really goes on when an initial police statement announces a “medical incident.”

NEWARK, NJ–The world has been watching the latest war between Israel and the Occupied Territory of Palestine-Gaza for the past seven weeks. According to the latest reports, to date, over 14,500 have been killed in Occupied Gaza and some 1,200 in Israel.

Today, representatives from Israel and Palestine reached a four-day truce set to begin tomorrow at 7 am. The agreement, brokered by Qatar,  outlines several key objectives, including the release of 50 Israeli hostages and 150 Palestinian prisoners, humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a halt on military engagement. 

Thanks to laws like Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the government is empowered to conduct mass surveillance with minimal safeguards to protect our privacy and rights. Because of this power, digital mass surveillance is trampling our very democracy.

May 15 of this year marked the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, or The Catastrophe. That’s 75 years since Palestinians were first forcibly expelled from their land, and they continue to be expelled to this day. This year, the United Nations (UN) commemorated the day with performances, testimonies, and videos at their New York City headquarters, featuring a keynote address by the President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, as well as a statement by the Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, Rosemary DiCarlo. 

Of all my views that have shifted as I've learned and grown, none may be as unrecognizable as my views on policing. I grew up in New Jersey, in a white neighborhood, in a white town, and had an uncle and next-door neighbor who were police officers. I saw the police as providing safety, protecting everyone from evil--the good guys. I wondered aloud why anyone would run from the police and thought cops should be able to use their cars against people who ran. Any cracks in that good guy facade didn't go very deep

As a Palestinian American farmer in urban Northern New Jersey, and a Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition, I recognize that the 2023 Farm Bill will dictate U.S. food and land policy more than any other policy decision over the next decade. It will set the stage for how our communities use the land they are rooted in and will decide who has access to that land. 

In dense communities like ours here in Passaic and Essex Counties, the Farm Bill will play a huge role in what land can and can't be protected. My hometown of Clifton was once mostly sun-kissed farmland. Clifton used to be known for its fertile land and provided food for neighboring communities. Today, there are only two parcels of farmland left in town after the third was recently sold to developers. 

Dear West Orange Town Council and Mayor McCartney,

I’m appealing to you about the planned “2nd annual Israeli flag raising at West Orange’s Town Hall in honor of ‘Israel's independence day’” scheduled for April 26th. I implore you to cancel it immediately! As the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, I say, “not in my name.” I don’t celebrate the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) at the hands of ruthless Zionists with the support of the British colonial army. How do you think Palestinians feel when people want to celebrate the day their villages were massacred, their families were driven from their homes, and their land was stolen?

Ronald Rice, a revered, senior political leader and one of the longest-serving state senators in New Jersey passed away on March 15, 2023. He exemplified honor, resilience, and doggedness: an example for friend and foe.

He is remembered with great sadness across the state, but for Public Square Amplified advisory committee members, John Smith and Linda McDonald Carter it is a deeply personal loss.

Yesterday, upon learning of Senator Rice’s death, Linda McDonald Carter delivered raw and personal sentiments in real time at the Newark Municipal Council hearing.

Corporate media stirred up deep dread and apprehension whilst shaping the social and political response of how and what we are to understand and consume in this recent state killing of a human being – Tyre Nichols. 

Major corporate media outlets, including public radio, teased out the video of the latest killing of a Black man by police as they would a major blockbuster movie or a ride in a Bezos or Musk spaceship. The narrative braced us for an explosion of wanton and rampant destruction, as gatekeepers are never fully convinced that the participants will not bring down the "big top", in its relatively commonplace fashion.

The violent beating of 29-year-old Black-American motorist Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee on Jan. 7, 2023, and leading to his death three days later, might be considered a sobering event in police-race relations, at least in the minds of many Americans. However, for scholars such as I who have studied this topic for decades, it comes as no surprise.

With only a few days left before Election Day, you’ve likely seen flyers or door hangers, received texts or phone calls, and seen the same political ads tens if not hundreds of times. And so it’s important to step back and ask: Why are people pouring all this time, energy, and money into getting you to vote? Not the collective you, the singular you, the you reading these words right now.

On Monday, October 3, 2022, the life of 16-year-old resident Letrell Duncan was tragically cut short by a senseless act of gun violence that has shaken our community to its core.

I’m From East Orange NJ. We call it “The Trenches.” A place where playing sports is the only way of making it out. The Trenches is a place where leadership and guidance are lacking. It’s a place where a bullet can crush pathways to success. Many of our youth won’t live to be old in The Trenches. It’s why it’s so important to say “Be Safe” when parting ways with our peers. “Be safe,” because anything can happen as we go our separate ways —and there’s always a possibility it will be the last time we see each other.

Our Revolution was created out of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign at the end of the 2016 election. It was created to bring together individuals who wanted to continue advancing progressive policies that Senator Sanders and others had been advocating for during the primaries. Advancing progressive policies nationally meant empowering and educating voters, supporting progressive candidates, and holding politicians accountable, both for their votes and how they’re influenced by corporate spending in politics.

Conscious Black Americans are quite familiar with what living under fascism will feel like.  In practical terms (considering various historical factors) fascism is dictatorship, totalitarianism by another name. Black folk already know what living under totalitarian rule feels like, for we are the American descendants of enslaved Africans. After emancipation, Reconstruction gave us a roughly 10-year glimmer of what participatory democracy could be in this former slave nation. But Reconstruction was betrayed by white men determined to turn back the clock, who ushered in a century-long era of Jim Crow, where lynching, chain gangs, enforced labor, false convictions, imprisonment, de facto and de jure segregation, and other denials of fundamental human and civil rights were once again commonplace throughout America. White dictatorial, totalitarian rule over Black human beings, in law and societal practice, reigned once again. 

On Wednesday, over 200 citizens assembled at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark for the third public hearing on New Jersey’s Environmental Justice Law (EJ Law). Organized by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), the hearing addressed the new rule proposals to the EJ Law, passed by Gov. Phil Murphy on Sept. 18, 2020. Patricia Cortado was one of over 45 citizens who testified on the rule proposals. Following is her original statement.

We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking that gun violence, mass shootings, and domestic terrorism are the result of a rise in mental disorders, depression, or distress among the perpetrators. We need to call out what we are seeing with unflinching clarity: The fundamental cause of the violence we see is White Supremacist-Patriarchal fear of losing the power and privilege ascribed to the psychology, system, and culture of “Whiteness” itself.

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, with notification of the end of the Civil War and a military edict to end the enslavement of African people in Confederate territory.

June 17, 2022, marks one year since Juneteeth was recognized as a federal holiday in the United States.

The following is the original speech by Racquel Romans-Henry, the Policy Director at Salvation and Social Justice, from the Juneteeth March & Rally for Reparations, Justice & Democracy—co-sponsored by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) and the People's Organization for Progress (POP).

In the past three decades, new questions about the integrity of the justice system have emerged as a series of convicted 'criminals' have proven their innocence.

The Innocence Project at the Cardoza Law School in New York, the National Registry of Exonerations, and other innocence advocacy groups have documented these exonerations and the dramatic impact DNA science is having on the criminal justice system.