By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — The 116th Congress, sworn in on January 3, is the most diverse our nation has ever seen. There are more women – 102 – than…
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — The 116th Congress, sworn in on January 3, is the most diverse our nation has ever seen. There are more women – 102 – than…
By David J. Harris, Houston Institute Executive Director — Several weeks ago the Boston Globe published an opinion piece by editorial and staff writer David Scharfenberg in which he called for an “honest” commitment to racial integration. He dismissed the “gauzy 1963 version” of integration, insisted that “harping too much” on its virtues “can feel paternalistic,” and lamented the “disastrous busing experiment of the 1970s” which proved that “forced integration…simply doesn’t work.” Even so,…
By Sanusi Lamido Sanusi — Africa’s relations with China have been the subject of interest for decades. At a deeply personal level, my own first contact with China was almost…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — It is in reaffirmation of the enduring issues ever before us, that I in the practice of sanofa, remember and reach back to visit the…
Black Achilles — The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether? By Tim Whitmarsh, Aeon — Few issues…
By Herb Boyd — “First you say you do/ Then you don’t. Then you say you will/Then you won’t/ You’re undecided now/ So what are you gonna do.” This indecision may work well in a popular song of yore, but it does little to end the 35 years former Black Panther and radio commentator Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent behind bars. On Thursday a Philadelphia Common Pleas judge ruled that Abu-Jamal who…
The region’s inequality and violence, in which the US has long played a role, is driving people to leave their homes By Julian Borger, The Guradian — Jakelin Caal Maquín,…
By Marisa Iati, The Washington Post — More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism. The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves…
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker — Cory Booker, one of a half-dozen Democrats routinely mentioned as a Presidential contender, is a man of singularly intense enthusiasms. He is a vegan…
How Staying Power shook British history. When it was published in 1984 Staying Power vividly captured the struggle for black British identity. Nearly 35 years on it still has lessons to teach. By Gary Younge, The Guardian — “The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison argued in a lecture in Portland, Oregon, in 1975: It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and…
Nixon came in part to avoid attending the funeral, but he also brought a check—later lost—for her children’s education, according to a family friend finally telling the story. By Eleanor…
By Greg Palast — It was a Republican, Martin Luther King Sr., who made John Kennedy president of the United States — for JFK’s saving Daddy King’s son, Martin Jr.,…