Progressive Media Advocates
Sikivu Hutchinson: Romney’s shucking and jiving about possible political gain from being Latino, while promoting nativist anti-undocumented immigrant policies that criminalize all Latinos regardless of citizenship status, attests to the business-as-usual racism of 21st century post-racial America.
Allegations of Racial Discrimination at Cal State – Dr. Marilyn Joshua Williams says she was being “unseated” as Chair of the department without cause. She is accusing the University of racial discrimination.
Mark Naison: We can do a lot more to promote racial and economic equality through programs of progressive taxation, promotion of unionization in low wage enterprises, and efforts to uproot discrimination in the labor market.
Sharon Kyle: In a culture where “whiteness” is rarely mentioned and hardly ever critically examined it is not surprising that the women in my church saw the story as heartwarming and uplifting. I, on the other hand, saw this as just another story of the black experience as viewed through the white lens.
Alvaro Huerta: Whether it’s Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., blaming the wildfires in the Southwest on immigrants coming across the border or whether it’s the state of Alabama passing the harshest anti-immigrant law in the country, it’s clear that brown-skinned immigrants have become the targets of the day.
Jessie Daniels: Do roommate matching sites facilitate racial discrimination in housing? if users on the sites engage in racial discrimination, what is the responsibility of the sites’ owners?
Steve Hochstadt: The billionaires who fund Tea Party organizations, the bankers and stock traders who support Republican campaigns, and the mining company owners who oppose more safety regulations let their public frontmen cite the Constitution, wave the Bible around, and accuse their opponents of socialism. And it still works.
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.
Berry Craig: Paul, who beat moderate Democrat Jack Conway, ran unabashedly as a tea party Republican. In Kentucky and elsewhere, a lot of latter day Johnny Rebs seem to be tea party Republicans.
Steve Hockstadt: Rand Paul discovered that most of his fellow Republicans disagreed with his idea that a significant part of the civil rights triumph of the 1960s was wrong. That led him and the Republican Party into a whole new strategy of pretending that past statements don’t exist and only allowing these very conservative candidates to appear in front of friendly media hosts, who will not ask about them.
Steve Hockstadt: The Tea Partiers are not what they seem. They say they’re about freedom, not party, that they just want government off their backs. They appear to attack incumbents of both parties. So why are they all Republicans?
Sikivu Hutchinson: Homegrown black support for or ambivalence about the Arizona law is symptomatic of a deep vein of frustration, anger, cultural resentment and xenophobia. Study after study indicates that African Americans are the most residentially segregated, suffer the greatest discrimination in job application and employment, and are amongst the biggest recipients of predatory mortgage loans.
Sikivu Hutchinson: Perhaps the only figure with national stature on the “religious left” who has been consistently vocal in his opposition to fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy has been Jimmy Carter. Clearly, if a comparable coalition existed on the Left the Religious Right’s moral and political influence on such issues as abortion, same sex marriage, stem cell research and intelligent design would be balanced by dissenting forces. That such a coalition does not exist underscores the bankruptcy of organized religion’s monopoly on morality and moral principle.
One of the most glaring ironies of the Middle East conflict is the righteous indignation displayed by the region’s leaders towards each other’s policies. In a region where violent and oppressive rule is the norm, leaders have no trouble pointing out each other’s flaws, often menacingly. And so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government [...]
Famed legal scholar, civil rights attorney and author, Lani Guinier, spoke at Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union in 2009. The first black woman tenured professor at Harvard Law School, Ms Guinier has authored and co-authored several books including Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy and Lift Every Voice: Turning a [...]
The California Supreme Court finds itself center stage this Thursday when it will hear oral arguments on whether it should uphold Proposition 8′s ban on same-sex marriage. The case touches the heart of our democracy and poses a profound question: can a bare majority of voters strip away an inalienable right through the initiative process? [...]
It was all too predictable that Attorney General Eric Holder would be attacked for his recent remarks about race in America. To suggest that the nation is still haunted by the specter of racism is unacceptable it seems, especially since, with the election of President Obama, we have ostensibly entered the “post-racial” era. But, in [...]
Michael Steele has been selected to lead the Republican Party. He is the first African-American to chair the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the second African-American to chair either of the two major party’s National Committee after Ron Brown, who chaired the Democratic National Committee. Michael Steele was the first black to serve in a [...]
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.
The U.S. House of Representatives issued an apology for slavery last week. Something some people have waited for some 10 lifetimes, something others thought would never happen, what was once a significant event that would lead to progress in Racial Americana went largely under-reported.
Since Obama’s presidential aspirations are beginning to look like they have the possibility of becoming reality, we’re hearing a term in political parlance that we haven’t heard for quite some time. The term I’m referring to is the “Bradley Effect”. I first heard mention of this phenomenon sometime in January 2008 during the Democratic Presidential [...]
The Presidency aspirations of Barack Obama have caused a renewed discussion on race in America. The prospect of a black President has cast America in a different light throughout the world — as demonstrated by Obama’s highly successful trip to the Middle East and Europe last week.
School Desegregation Busing (Part 2 of a 2 part story) ast forward 20 years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and we found ourselves embroiled in yet another school desegregation controversy. The more things change… It was September 1973, I was about to enter the 11th grade in a new [...]
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.
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