As the nation marks the one year anniversary of the Newtown shootings in Connecticut, it is no closer to Federal gun control legislation.

The holiday season is here. In millions of homes across the country, loved ones are missing from holiday celebrations, parents are longing for the warm embrace of a son or daughter, siblings are reminiscing of times past, and children are longing for their moms and dads.

The histories and holidays of the oppressed, colonized and enslaved are, of necessity, different from the history and holidays of the oppressor, the colonizer and the enslaver.
By Steve Patrick Ercolani
Since 1996, hundreds of thousands of longtime U.S. residents have been sent back to their native countries for small, non-violent infractions—and without courtroom trials.

By Nicole Flatow, ThinkProgress
A year ago this time, when President Obama issued presidential mercy to one lucky turkey, he hadn’t exercised this presidential pardon a single time that year to spare a human being facing prison.

In my most recent article, I called upon the Black Nation and our allies to seize the X-MAS season (the commercialized, corrupted, capitalist version of Christmas) to intensify the Justice for Trayvon Martin, Economic Sanctions/Boycott Florida Campaign.

By Greg Kaufmann
There are 50 million people who are food insecure—meaning they can’t meet their basic food needs and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from—and yet both Democrats and Republicans are debating how much more to cut from a food stamp program that was already cut on November 1 and now has an average benefit of only $1.40 per meal.

OAKLAND, Calif. — For Adama Mosley, a resident of the West Oakland neighborhood known as “Ghosttown,” having solar panels installed on her home was “a dream come true.” Mosely had long been concerned about pollution from freeways and nearby brownfields (contaminated former industrial sites), contributing to the area’s high levels of asthma.
By Michael Kimmel
Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities.
Even before President Barack Obama entered the White House, Rush Limbaugh, a conservative radio personality, hoped the President would fail.

The one thing we cannot have in our ridiculous ongoing modern prohibitionist state is a criminal justice system that punishes the criminals in law enforcement as harshly as it punishes those at whom the laws are aimed, and on whom the law principally falls.
Craig Stephen Wilder’s fine Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of American Universities has followed, with deeper historical research, a path blazed by Ruth Simmons, the first African-American president of Brown, in investigating the origins in slavery and the slave trade of the Ivy League Schools.