Carl Bloice: Unemployment is up. Joblessness has increased for African Americans. Black women are being hit especially hard. The question now is whether the people running the country really care? And if they do, why are they avoiding the subject?
Beware of the Racial Demagoguery
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Carl Bloice: With public opinion across the political spectrum clearly opposed to slashing the healthcare and retirement programs, any negotiated settlement would be undemocratic.
Saying ‘I’m Not a Racist’ — Honestly
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Steve Hochstadt: I was born into this American racist consensus and I have lived to see its demise. The greatest proof that we are nearing the end of this idea is the constantly repeated claim, “I am not a racist.”
My Passover Odyssey
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Ruth Broyde Sharone: Perhaps the most memorable Seder I filmed, however, which ultimately had a profound influence on my life and my career, was led by a Black Pastor, Charles C. Queen, for 600 African Americans. “The Israelites were getting out of Egypt,” he intoned. “They were going to be free people!”
Manning Marable: Provocative Scholarship In Life & Death
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Anthony Samad: Manning Marable, and his provocative scholarship, will be sorely missed. We’ve lost a true radical thinker and articulator of the African American experience in America.
Like Black Church, St. Patrick’s Day Parades Are Anti-Gay
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Rev. Irene Monroe: St. Patrick’s Day has rolled around again, and like previous March 17th celebrations nationwide, its LGBTQ communities are not invited. As a contentious and protracted argument for now over two decades, parade officials have a difficult time grasping the notion that being Irish and gay is also part of their heritage.
The New Geography: Today The Middle East, Tomorrow Zamunda
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Jasmyne Cannick: It’s no secret that news out of Africa and about Africans is no daily consequence in most national newscasts and that when we do make the news, depending on the region — countries in Africa end up in this fictional continent known as The Middle East.
Cops Are Missing the Bad Guys While Profiling the Black Guys
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David Love: Reading 12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today made me angry, not because the subject matter was brand new to me, but because it was far too familiar – not only as a black man, but also as a human rights advocate who worked with police brutality victims and their families back in the 1990s, and decided to go to law school as a result.
To Be Atheist, Feminist, and Black
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Sadly, there is still a fair amount of ignorance and bigotry toward black non-believers in African American communities due to the stereotype that atheists are immoral, rudderless, and not authentically black.
Faith Predators: Looting the American Dream
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Sikivu Hutchinson: The solipsism of the prosperity gospel as vehicle for commodity capitalism mires African-American communities in an endless spiral of dependence on the supernatural.
Packers-Steelers Super Bowl Politics
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Randy Shaw: For those without a rooting interest in either the Pittsburgh Steelers or Green Bay Packers, the teams’ politics might help you decide for whom to cheer.
Womanist and Saying Who We Are
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Rev. Irene Monroe: The secular use of “womanist” is by African-American women who have either left the Black Church because of its gender bias and homophobia, or who do not come from the Black Church religious experience. These women use the term to identify a culturally specific form of women-centered politics and theory.
Trust Black Women: Remove the Billboards
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Jan Robinson Flint: It is reprehensible that someone would use Black children as a tool to attack Black women for political purposes.
“My Daddy Is a Presbyterian Preacher”
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Berry Craig: My town — and many more like it across the South and in border states like Kentucky — was deeply divided by the color bar. I didn’t see it because it didn’t affect me. Before meeting Cecil Horton, black people were invisible to me, as in the title of Ralph Ellison’s famous novel.
Concerning Advocacy and Criminality
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Jonathan Farley: Why do campaigning organizations like the NAACP defend plain thugs but ignore genuine radicals?
New York Times Book Review Excludes Black, Latino Critics
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Randy Shaw: The latest example of the sad decline of the New York Times Book Review under editor Sam Tanenhaus is its January 2, 2010 edition on “Why Criticism Matters” that excludes African-American and Latino critics.
Haley Barbour’s Yazoo City and Mine
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James Loewen: The issue isn’t that Barbour misremembers the past. Nor is the problem that when he was a teenager, he was not attentive to Martin Luther King’s visit. The problem is that Haley Barbour has spent his entire life not seeing injustice, so he could work to perpetrate injustice.
Should Kwanzaa Stay in Black Neighborhoods?
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Rev. Irene Monroe: This Kwanzaa holiday, I’ll head out to the neighborhood store to purchase my red, black and green candles for the kinara, because I know that the strength of the U.S. economy is found in its multicultural small community owned businesses that reflect our nation’s diversity. And in so doing, I would also be honoring the fourth principle of Kwanzaa which is cooperative economics.
Black America Still Sees AIDS as a Gay Disease
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Irene Monroe: If black America were its own country, standing on its own like Haiti or Nigeria, black Americans would rate 16th with the epidemic in the world. And the epidemic is heavily concentrated in urban enclaves like Detroit, New York, Newark, Washington, D.C and the Deep South.
Color Blindness
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Steve Hochstadt: Our nation also has far to go. Claiming that we are color blind, that whites no longer have privileges in America, that we need no longer worry about preventing discrimination is nonsense. One need only have observed the reception of our first black President to know how important skin color still is in America.
Remembering Trans Heroine Rita Hester
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Irene Monroe: This weekend is the 12th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance and many of us across the nation will be memorializing transgender Americans murdered because of their gender identities or gender expressions.
An Early Morning Look at Attorney General–Kamala Harris: UPDATED
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Eric Garcetti: Kamala ended the night/early morning with a 40,382 vote lead statewide, with 96.2% of the precincts statewide reporting. This is only a 0.6% margin, but she is ahead. The outstanding precincts are located in four counties: San Bernadino, Riverside, Kings, and Yolo. These counties are still counting.
Word To “The Motha:” Isn’t It Nice to Have Landed on the Right of History?
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Anthony Samad: Diane Watson had to be dragged, kicking and screaming the whole way, to the right side of history. And now she’s serving the first African American President and part of a Congress that passed universal health care, something she worked her whole life for in the California legislature and something seven Presidents couldn’t do.
Why Clarence Thomas Owes African-Americans an Apology
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David Love: When Ginni Thomas — the Tea Partying wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — left Anita Hill a voicemail message asking for an apology, she got it all wrong. It’s really Clarence Thomas who owes the apology, to the black community that is.
African American Youth Joblessness and the “New Normal”
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Carl Bloice: If it remains almost impossible for a couple of generations of young women and men to earn a decent living, it is calamitous for black people and the country. They cannot become the personification of the “new normal.”
Free Speech about Saggy Pants
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Steve Hochstadt: The most unfortunate recent development in American politics is that Constitutional questions cannot be discussed calmly. Too many people care less about defending our Constitution than using it as a club to smash political opponents.
Tea Party Diversity?
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David Love: People of color and other minorities need membership in the Tea Party like they needed membership in the White Citizens’ Council during Jim Crow. And the notion of Tea Party diversity is just as implausible.
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