By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Hutchinson Report — I have been hard line, uncompromising, and relentless in my criticism of Bill Cosby’s sexual crimes and in my withering call for justice for his victims, Yet, I must say that I felt a pang of deep remorse and sadness in gazing at the picture of Cosby being led out of the Pennsylvania courtroom with his head bowed, and his hands manacled. It…
Video — Dr. Kevin Murriel’s Response to the Meeting of Black Pastors with President Trump. Cascade United Methodist Church. Sunday, August 5, 2018.
Do we have any reason to believe that each new generation of white people will be more open-minded and tolerant than previous ones? Elvira Koneva By Margaret Hagerman, The Conversation…
Smearing Anita Hill as “nutty and slutty” worked wonders in the ’90s, so conservatives are doing it all over again. By Amanda Marcotte, Salon — In 1991, when law school professor…
Vantage Point Vignettes, Comments and Commentary by Dr. Ron Daniels — For decades I have been hammering home the point that in a low voter participation environment, the group that…
Why white Americans have such a hard time picturing a middle-class black neighborhood. By Henry Grabar, Slate — In John Sayles’ 1984 movie The Brother From Another Planet, a card shark is riding a northbound A train that is about to make the 66-block jump from Midtown to Harlem. “I have another magic trick for you,” he says. “Wanna see me make all the white people disappear?” The conductor announces the train…
Sundiata Cha-Jua, The News Gazette — In recent years, the U.S. government has demonstrated a commitment to passing largely meaningless symbolic legislation designed to sanitize the country’s history of racial…
By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker — One hazard of the trolling that the United States has been subjected to from the White House for the past twenty months is that even the most alarming patterns can be hard to discern, and the most prominent dots impossible to connect. Yet a seemingly different pattern preceded the speech that Barack Obama delivered on Friday, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in which he…
Emanuel’s pro-corporate policies ravaged Black and Latinx communities across Chicago. His successor will be tasked with reversing this trend. By Saqib Bhatti, In These Times — This week, Chicagoans celebrated Rahm Emanuel’s announcement that he will not seek another term as mayor. But while Emanuel’s departure is welcome news to many, the next mayor of Chicago will have to come up with an aggressive plan to repair the damage that Emanuel’s…
By Melani McAlister, The Conversation — The close relationship between American evangelicals and Russia has lately been discussed widely in the news media. In particular, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint in July against a Russian woman, Maria Butina, for trying to use the National Prayer Breakfast, a star-studded affair, as a “back channel of communication” with prominent American religious and political leaders. Among them is Franklin Graham, son of the well-known evangelist, Billy Graham…
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig — The only way to end slavery is to stop being a slave. Hundreds of men and women in prisons in some 17 states are refusing to carry out prison labor, conducting hunger strikes or boycotting for-profit commissaries in an effort to abolish the last redoubt of legalized slavery in America. The strikers are demanding to be paid the minimum wage, the right to vote, decent…
By WP BrandStudio, The Washington Post — Within just four years, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, two of America’s most influential and notable abolitionists, were born in close proximity on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Douglass was born in 1818 in Talbot County; four years later, Tubman was born just a few miles south, in Dorchester County. When it came to their approaches to abolitionism, the difference between them was “marked,”…