Progressive Media Advocates
Diane Lefer: Judge Gray referred to Senator Jim Webb of Virginia who, in looking at the entire criminal justice system in which we hold the world record for the number of people incarcerated, concluded either we are the most evil people in the world or we are doing something seriously wrong.
Sylvia Moore: This year’s Just Media: L.A. Media Reform Summit, held Feb. 26 at Occidental College, drew 200 activists, speakers and concerned members of the public for an all-day conference on how to build a better news and information environment for our communities.
Jessie Daniels: Brisenia Flores was a 9-year-old girl murdered in Arizona by anti-immigrant vigilantes, yet her death – unlike that of the 9-year old killed last week in Arizona – is getting almost no attention in the U.S. mainstream media.
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.
Megan E. Paredes: A lack of return of city services to the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood whose residents are mostly African American, is symbolic of a lack of motivation to help a culture in crisis.
David Love: That anyone can actually utter the words “the recession is over” at a time of mass unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness and general despair tells you all you need to know about America. The nation actually exists as two nations: the few that have, and the many who don’t.
Sikivu Hutchinson: When a little white girl goes missing, online news, supermarket tabloids and cable network stations bombard us with up-to-the-minute dispatches on the crime, the victim, her shattered family and anguished community. When a little black girl is murdered in cold blood by a big city police department it is up to the community and those who care about social justice to ensure that the case doesn’t fade into the national obscurity that is usually reserved for the lives of people of color.
Adam Eran: When the nation’s most trusted newsman is Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, it’s no surprise that sensible debate about public policy is at least hard to find. Lately, however, such policy debates have become positively surreal.
Catherine Allgor: The Obama presidency has given rise to much soul-searching about who we are as a nation and how we should behave toward each other, within our borders and around the world. Perhaps this is the time we should consider the alternatives Dolley Madison offered us at the dawn of the national experiment. In the early days of the nation, few of Dolley’s contemporaries could resist her invitations. At this particular turning point in our modern nationhood, neither should we.
Michelle Alexander: They’re missing in churches, missing from their families, missing from college campuses, and absent from work. Black women can’t find a man to marry. Black children don’t know where to find their fathers. Where are those guys?
Friday Feedback: Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream doesn’t just belong to any one particular group. It belongs to all of us. The civil rights struggle is a human rights struggle, and the LGBT community should be a part of it.
I believe that as time passes and the world shrinks, it becomes more difficult for discrimination to find a safe harbor. Modern technology serves to eliminate borders and expose our activities before the light of day. The nations of Asia, like the U.S., have a long way to go before they eradicate racism.
While progressive talk radio may not attract the numbers Limbaugh attracts, there is hope on the horizon. One ray of hope is radio talk show host Mario Solis Marich. Recently, we were invited to do a spot on his show, the Mario Solis Marich Show on Progressive Talk Radio AM 1150 in Los Angeles.
Thus after a history of repeated othering of African Americans in the US, it is not unusual for the picture of the black thief climbing through the windows of our homes to evolve into the imaginings of a black man in the White House stealing our healthcare and hard fought freedoms.
Unemployment is and always has been much higher in Black and Latino communities. But the gap has widened during this recession. In fact, Black unemployment is nearly double that of Whites, while Latinos are unemployed at a rate one-third higher than their White counterparts.
Joe Biden was quite out front about it. On the same day the newspapers were trumpeting the news that President Obama had felt a “glimmer of hope” in the economic situation, the Vice-President was telling CNN that we can expect unemployment to increase each month for the rest of the year. Joblessness stands at 8.5% [...]
I don’t remember exactly when I began to think this way, but looking back, it must have been at some point during my early elementary school years that I began to believe the “American History” I was learning in school was either incomplete or misleading. I understood and accepted that I needed to master this [...]
Whites Deny Racism Continues to Exist ot long ago, after I had written an article in which I discussed white denial–the tendency for most white folks to reject the notion that racism is still a significant obstacle for people of color in the U.S.–I received an e-mail from a white man who insisted that my [...]
Not too long ago, Dick and I joined our local Unitarian Universalist Church, Neighborhood Church in Pasadena. Shortly after we started attending, the church contacted us about a potluck dinner they were having for the congregation’s “people of color.” Being a newcomer to the church, I tried my best to be gracious as I inquired [...]
Blind to Racism is a series that tells of incidents you won’t hear about in the media or history books. These are the types of incidents, frequently experienced by people of color, that inform them of the progress the country is or isn’t making on the racial divide.
I woke up one morning feeling like I’d awakened in a different country. Sort of. Barack Obama’s passing the numerical finish line was still not quite the end of the Democratic primary season. “She” had yet to concede. It should have been All-Obama-All-the-Time, but it wasn’t. Very well, then. He’s handled this turn of events [...]
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Who’s Who In Black Los Angeles: Who Really Wants To Know and What Is This Really About?
Anthony Asadullah Samad: Guess who discovered Who’s Who In Black Los Angeles after two years? Before you ask, I really wanted to feature a Los Angeles Times editor in Who’s Who in Black Los Angeles. Really. The problem is, there is not a single African American among those who make coverage decisions for the paper. In hindsight, it probably was a mistake not to include the one black man on the paper’s full-time Metro reporting staff. That brother deserves a special award for what I imagine he goes through everyday. Well, maybe next year.