Tim Wise: Perhaps it is President Obama who has internalized the idea that black people, even highly educated ones, are would-be malingerers, just waiting for a reason to go soft and “blame the world for trying to keep a black man down.”
Being African-American in America
These articles offer a glimpse into the lives of African-Americans in America. This should not be used to represent the "black experience". It is simply a collection of articles, written from a specific perspective. Most of the authors listed below are either African-American or are those who have delved deeply into the African-American experience through advanced studies and lived experience through relationship.
Movies and Memories of Our Racist Past
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Charles Hayes: What 42 makes crystal clear is how shallow and superficial the strain of contempt is that enables and sustains racism as prejudice is handed down from one generation to the next.
Emulating Malcolm X
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Bill Fletcher Jr.: Malcolm X’s transformation cannot be understood outside of a recognition that his adoption of a belief system and a commitment to something larger than himself involved a dedication to the building of organization.
When Homophobia Trumps Misogyny
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Irene Monroe: Joyner points to the ongoing struggle in the African American community with its unresolved homophobia and misogyny that falls on the backs of its women and LGBTQ population, pitting one disenfranchised group against another.
What Would Washington Think?
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Berry Craig: We are getting closer to that “more perfect union” the constitution was supposed to make us. Far more people enjoy “the blessings of liberty” cited in our national charter than they did in Washington’s day.
Play Ball, Jackie
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Steve Hochstadt: I don’t know how my parents’ political views, our family’s history during the Holocaust, rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Jackie’s own nobility and fearless civil rights activism mixed together to make me hate racism.
Mad Science or School-to-Prison? Criminalizing Black Girls
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Sikivu Hutchinson: In many American classrooms, black children are treated like ticking time bomb savages, shoved into special education classes, disproportionately suspended and expelled then warehoused in opportunity schools, juvenile jails and adult prisons.
Prison House of Textbook History: Remembering the Chicano Blowouts
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Sikivu Hutchinson: In the march of great Western liberal democratic traditions there were no textbook portrayals of the homegrown activism in our own communities or link between the apartheid legacy of the past and its echoes in the present.
Graduation Day: When Foster Care Works
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Tom Hall: Every day in Los Angeles, parents and foster parents and social workers and teachers strive so that Anton and Joseph and Marlon and Eric and Laquisha and Ronette can have lives beyond the bigotry, beyond the fear, beyond poverty.
Why Jackie Robinson Still Matters
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Anthony Samad: Jackie Robinson showed us that blacks and whites could co-exist on the same intellectual, emotional and physical planes. America had to see it before they could “see it.”
Defense of Marriage: Racism, Family Values, and the 99%
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Living in a culture in which they are reminded daily of their non-existence by a white supremacist heterosexist nation that deifies straight white beauty ideals and views affordable housing as a privilege, some LGBT homeless youth of color resort to destructive behaviors like survival sex and drug abuse.
Save the Term, “Negro”… Really?
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Anthony Samad: Anybody ever stopped to think why Negroes stopped calling themselves Negroes? Because, it was a term of subjugation that turned into a racial designation, to mark black people for discrimination.
Christopher Dorner, Racism, and LA’s Police Department
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Jasmyne Cannick: I want to see the relationship between Blacks and the LAPD improve and I believe that it has. But I also believe that we just took a huge step backwards with Dorner and no amount of community meetings with civil rights leaders and the LAPD posing for cameras is going to fix that.
Questions Remain After Christopher Dorner Episode Ends
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Anthony Samad: The same dignity Dorner had in his work, he lost in his death. But he made his point. The system he once believed in, and defended, is still broken and nobody seems to care.
Desiline Victor and Black History Month
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Joseph Palermo: Desiline Victor’s travails in trying to vote last November bring to mind Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 when white vigilantes tortured and killed Micky Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney who had volunteered to register black voters.
Rosa Parks: Angry, Not Tired
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Peter Dreier: Rosa Parks’ defiance of Montgomery’s segregation laws was not an isolated incident. It was part of a lifelong crusade to dismantle Jim Crow.
The Radical King: Is The Absence of Tension the Presence of Justice?
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Antonhy Samad: IWhat black people should be using as a day of critical observation and self-examination, we use to parade and party. And you wonder why the world thinks black people are crazy for remaining in the conditions of socio-economic compromise for as long as they have.
Left and Right: Not Opposite Equals
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Tina Dupuy: False equivalency benefits the right. A pox on both your houses disengages people from the political process and that helps Republicans. As we’ve seen in the midterms: When fewer people vote, more Republicans get into office.
Corporations Are Not People
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Steve Hochstadt: The problem with treating corporations as people for the purpose of political speech is that it provides another opportunity for rich and powerful corporate executives to magnify their speech with money which belongs to others.
A Rice Worth Fighting For
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Karen Finney: Such a fight would galvanize support for Obama among progressives, creating goodwill he might need heading in to the “fiscal cliff” and budget discussions, which could require unpopular concessions from the president.
How to Never Win Another Election
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Robin Lakoff: Once upon a time, when women, African Americans, and Latinos were unable to vote, it was safe to demean and insult them to beef up the egos of those who could. That time is no more.
Mapping Racism Through Digital Media
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Jessie Daniels: Following Obama’s re-election, white people who rooted for the other guy took to various forms of digital media and unleashed their disappointment. Some white folks went a good deal farther than disappointment into overt racism.
American Racism Past and Present
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Sharon Kyle: 20 years after Los Angeles erupted in civil unrest, still with major differentials in employment, housing, healthcare, education, and wealth between whites and blacks, are we sitting on a powder keg again?
Graduate Them, Don’t Incarcerate Them!
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Diane Lefer: Los Angeles Unified School District has cut suspension rates in half, in part thanks to a new policy that was adopted after tireless advocacy by community groups
Should Progressives Stop Criticizing Obama?
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Randy Shawo: While Obama draws overwhelming support among African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, single women and organized labor, some progressives continue to attack him. But with Romney-Ryan posing a dire threat to progressive interests, this criticism should stop until after Election Day.
Racism: Ignorance Seasoned with Paranoia
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Sheria Reid: The new trend appears to be to insist that black people and liberals are the new racists but I have never come across anyone who goes so far as to declare that we have started the Jim Crow period against white people.
Gabby Douglas and the Brown Paper Bag Test
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Sharon Kyle: Colorism gives unearned advantages to Blacks of lighter complexion and demeans and degrades Blacks of darker complexions. For white people reading this who are unaware of this practice, there is a test known as “the brown paper bag test” used to determine where your skin color placed you in the pecking order.
Gabby Douglas and White Man’s Privilege
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Unai Montes-Irueste: Bob Costas’ backhanded compliment of Gabby Douglas’ ability to overcome “imaginary barriers,” is undeniably a statement uttered by a rich white man, blinded by his privilege.
Chick-Fil-A: Gays Can Be Bullies, Too
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Jasmyne Cannick: Gays whose feathers have been ruffled by Chick-Fil-A need to demonstrate a little common sense—find somewhere else to eat and take ten of their best friends with them.
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Racist Rants in Post-Racial America
Sharon Kyle: On the heels of the re-election of President Obama, signs tell us we are NOT yet living in post-racial America