In the Sixties and even for a short time afterward, Blackness was conceived and engaged as a very serious and sacred thing.
The evidence is all around us. As the United States crawls towards its 250th anniversary the nation’s racial discord is tearing it apart at its seams.
When journalist and TV critic Alessandra Stanley decided to open her recent New York Times profile of television producer Shonda Rhimes…
The first video that came to light in the now infamous Ray Rice domestic violence incident had me shaking my head in disbelief
The 2016 presidential race hasn’t officially started yet, but we all know the presumptive contenders for party nominee.
The horrific death of Michael Brown on August 9th was not just an “incident,” not just an “accident,” nor just “an unfortunate situation.” The reaction from communities of color across the nation and protests against police brutality that have followed are also not, as Fox Contributor Linda Chavez has put it, attempts to “enhance” racial fears and animosity by employing the “mantra of the Black unarmed teenager shot by a white cop.”
With a sweeping and widely praised new essay on reparations in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has challenged Americans to reconsider how they view their country’s history and to place the influence of white supremacy front and center. Rather than imagine the damages inflicted against African-Americans by white supremacy as having occurred mainly during the antebellum period, Coates asks us to recognize how Jim Crow in the South and redlining in the North denied black people the means to build real, stable lives for themselves, directly explaining the disproportionate poverty we still see in the African-American community today.
By April M. Short Carl Hart grew up in Miami in what he calls the ‘hood, a poor community with high rates of crime and prevalent drug use. He kept…
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, testified before a grand jury this Tuesday, September 16. Wilson testified for four hours and was “cooperative,” a source told the Post-Dispatch. At the direction of St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, the grand jury will have until January 7 to decide whether to indict Wilson on criminal charges. As of now, Wilson is still on paid administrative leave.
January 1, 2014 marked the 210th Anniversary of the Haitian Revolution, one of the greatest events in human history. Never before had an enslaved people rebelled against their slave masters to declare their independence and establish a nation. Inspired by the exhortations and sacrifice of the spiritual priest Boukman and ably led by Toussaint Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and Alexandre Petion, this is precisely what the enslaved Africans of Haiti achieved. They crushed the military forces of Napoleon Bonaparte at the pinnacle of his power and established the world’s first Black Republic!
It’s been a month since the shooting of Michael Brown, who was unarmed, black and 18 years old.
One month ago, the nation’s consciousness around race relations was awoken abruptly following the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. For many people, this awakening was a sharp reminder that the victories of the Civil Rights era aren’t so far back in the shadows…