By R. Drew Smith, RNS — American religion and politics have been stubbornly connected — except where we pretend they aren’t. Despite constitutional separations between church and state, religion has been more closely tied to politics and politics more closely tied to religion than most care to admit. And yet, advocates for international religious freedom often treat religious freedom and political freedom as totally separate and distinct domains. This separation…
By Dr. Keith Magee — America is experiencing the most perilous of times in recent history as the result of its president, Donald Trump. Even though Monday morning he stepped forward to speak against the weekend’s hate crimes, it lacks residence because of the hate that has been reverberating since his stance against the Central Park Five, his ascendance in the GOP with the birther inquisition of Barack Obama, and…
By Julianne Malveaux — The US House of Representatives passed the Securing America’s Fair Elections (SAFE) Act in June by a nearly totally partisan vote of 225-184 in late June. Only one Republican voted for legislation that would mandate paper ballots, increase election security, and create safeguards to prevent foreign interference in our elections. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) opposes the legislation and won’t even allow it to be…
By David Ragland, Yes! — “If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.” — letter to former master from Jourdon Anderson…
In theory, a president can offer comfort at times like these. But this one would prefer to hurl insults. By Richard Wolffe, The Guardian — In normal American mass murders – because such horrors have become so astonishingly normal – the president usually plays the role of some great but helpless comfort blanket. He may be unable to break the NRA’s cold, dead grip on the Republican party, but he…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Dylann S. Roof is an avowed white supremacist. He wantonly, brazenly, and unapologetically slaughtered nine African-Americans in a South Carolina church in 2015. He’s under a federal death sentence. He’s the kind of heinous mass murderer that almost no one other than maybe his mother could have an ounce of human sympathy for. Few would say that if anyone ever deserved the death penalty for…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — PART 1. We don’t have to be familiar with Frantz Fanon to concede that social conditions create, shape and even determine social consciousness. Nor do we have to be conversant with Kawaida philosophy to realize that ideas do not drop from the sky, grow from the ground or float in from the sea. They come from the society in which we live and learn to…
By Danyelle Solomon — 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of Africans sold into bondage arriving on Virginia’s shores. It has been 156 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, 55 years since the end of Jim Crow, and 51 years since the civil rights movement. All of these moments in U.S. history represent crossroads—moments where the country made a choice or where people demanded that the words on the pages of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights became more than words; that policies and practices were equitably distributed among all people, not just a select few…
‘The Most Formidable Mind of Our Times.’ By Tayari Jones, Times — I have never been to Lorain, Ohio, but it has been on my bucket list for 20 years at least. I’m curious about this town, population 64,000, located 120 miles north of Columbus, at the mouth of Black River. One of my students drove across the country, passing through the town with which I was so infatuated. I…
By Chandra Muzaffar — A number of commentators have linked the killing of 20 people at a Walmart store in El Paso in the United States of America on Saturday 3rd August 2019 to the rising tide of White Supremacism. White Supremacism is a belief that whites are superior to others and therefore have a right to dominate them. There were elements of such thinking in a “manifesto” posted online…
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