By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Hutchinson Report — Trump talked about peace, harmony and all sides coming together but did not once mention the two words that if ever applied…
The president’s closing argument in the midterm elections lays bare the logic of his appeal. By Adam Serwer, The Atlantic — After Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election, a certain conventional wisdom congealed within the pundit class: Donald Trump’s success was owed to the Democratic abandonment of the white working class and the party’s emphasis on identity politics. By failing to emphasize a strong economic message, the thinking went, the party had…
Georgia’s refusal to process 53,000 voter registrations, mostly filed by African-Americans, is the latest in a long history of black voter suppression in the South, from poll taxes to literacy tests. By Frederick Knight, The Conversation — Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp has been sued for suppressing minority votes after an Associated Press investigation revealed a month before November’s midterm election that his office has not approved 53,000 voter registrations – most…
White Democrats are becoming more liberal; black Democrats aren’t. That fact is driving black candidates to win by executing a savvy strategy. By Theodore R. Johnson, Politico Magazine — It’s too soon to award the moniker, but 2018 may well be remembered as the political “Year of the Black Progressive,” much as 1992 was the “Year of the Woman.” Black women are taking office as mayors in major cities such…
By Michael Tomasky, The New York Review — The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present by Allan J. Lichtman Harvard University Press, 315 pp., $27.95 If you grew up, as I did, in the 1960s and 1970s, watching (albeit through a child’s eyes) the civil rights movement notch victory after victory, you could be forgiven for thinking at the time that that happy condition was normal.…
A Black sailmaker was helping to lead the anti-slavery movement long before it was popular in America. By Sean Braswell, OZY — In the spring of 1842, several thousand Philadelphians poured into the streets for one of the largest funerals in the city’s history. It was a remarkable sight: An interracial procession that included everyone from poor Black laborers to wealthy White merchants to sea captains and shippers. On that…
JOHANNESBURG – Earlier colonialists came by boats to “the new world” and expanded their empires by building railroads, farms and infrastructure. Today’s colonialists are digital; they implement communication infrastructures such as social media in order to harvest data and turn it into money. This threatens the upcoming democracies in Africa, as they experience explosions of fake news and misinformation with tribal violence and democratic unrest as dire consequences.
New candidates will create opportunities for Democrats across the country—if the establishment is willing to back them. By Steve Phillips, The Nation — Old wineskins must make room for new wine.” During the Rainbow Coalition days of the 1980s, Jesse Jackson used that biblical reference to press the Democratic Party to make structural and strategic changes in order to seize the opportunities presented by the country’s demographic revolution. Today, this…
After losing in 2012, the GOP enacted the harshest limits on voting since Jim Crow. It could make the difference this year from Florida to North Dakota. By Jay Michaelson, Daily Beast — With Democrats furious over Donald Trump, and many Republicans furious over the treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the 2018 elections are likely to see the highest turnout of midterm voters in recent history. But those voters will be confronted by…
He escaped from slavery, and helped rescue America. By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker — Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was. Frederick’s father, as David W. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet…
Trump and his ilk are channeling a noxious strain of patriotism that creates a nostalgia for a past that never existed. By Robert Scheer, Alternet / Truthdig — In a compelling…
The justices again appear poised to pursue a purely theoretical liberty at the expense of the lives of people of color. By Adam Serwer, The Atlantic — When the Louisiana State Militia finally arrived at the Colfax courthouse on April 15, 1873, all it could do was bury the bodies. Two days earlier, a large force of white supremacists had taken control of the courthouse from the mostly black faction…