Commentaries/Opinions

In this Budget Debate 2014-2015, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller gave a marathon address to Parliament. Fidel Castro in his heyday was famous for giving speeches that went on ad infinitum.

On October 22, 1949, The New Yorker published a report by Lillian Ross on that year’s Miss America Pageant. It begins,

There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.

Over the past several days, the news has been full of stories about LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and the racist outburst that’s gotten him banned for life by the NBA. But another story Vox wrote about this month that’s gotten far less attention probably tells us more — and something more disturbing — about how racism works in America today.

When Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, told his girlfriend he did not want her bringing blacks to Clippers’ games, he wasn’t talking to some blue-eyed blond.

At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been called to “give voice to those opposing privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing.”