Tim Wise: It’s a common argument, made by those who would rather ignore or finesse the problem of racism in America. If you can’t argue the facts, never fear, just suggest that certain facts are too dangerous to be spoken. The possibility that persons of color might adopt a victim mentality once they learn the extent of racism, means we simply have to move on, and tell those who are, as a matter of fact, often the victims of injustice not to dwell on their experiences too much, lest their commitment to self-help be vitiated.

Robert Fuller: you conclude that rankism is human nature — that we’re like the apes, and they do it, so we have no choice — and dismiss the possibility of overcoming it, consider this list of specific kinds of “put downs” that, not long ago, were deemed cool, but have become a sure way to embarrass yourself.

Michelle Alexander: The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth and fame.

I don’t care if you believe that whites are better than blacks, or if your religion teaches that the Bible says gays are immoral, you don’t have the right to oppress other citizens. You don’t have the right to deny the benefits of civil marriage to the children of gay citizens. Not in this country. That’s what makes Martin Luther King’s work so powerful – he stood up for what was ethically right, and his demands were in alignment with the Constitution of our great nation: Equal rights for all!

John Delloro: With a rise in right-wing populism, I am worried. Our history tells us that immigration will become the key hot button issue these next coming elections and, in the past, hate crimes against AAPIs and Latina/os have consistently risen with increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, especially during low economic periods.

I can’t say I was “disappointed” in the jobs summit, because I didn’t expect it to be more than window dressing, but every day I wake up with the hope that President Obama will read one of the articles by people like Paul Krugman or Bob Herbert in the NY Times and a light will finally click on in that sharp brain of his.

When discrimination and injustice are race-based, we call it racism; when they’re gender-based, we call it sexism. By analogy, rank-based abuse and exploitation are rankism. We won’t be able to confront rankism until we overcome our fear of seeming uppity by using the word in public.

But there are thousands, no, millions, of everyday people who have served their time and paid their debt to society, yet they can’t get a minimum wage job flipping burgers. They need a second chance just to survive.

President Obama was right the first time when he said the police acted stupidly, because they should know better. It’s unfortunate that the president found it necessary to step back and retract the remark because until we can see this kind of action with some objectivity, we will never learn enough to actually be objective in such matters.

Yet, the long view shows that since this racial system had a beginning, and important changes have taken place, one can venture that it will also have an end. The election of Barack Obama is an encouraging sign.

None of us African-American residents of Cambridge are surprised or shocked by the humiliation and harassment Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 58, of Harvard University encountered at the hands of Cambridge police.

Exposure to a wide range of life experiences and education are the keys to progress. Judge Sotomayor has had both the benefits of that exposure and the formal as well as practical education necessary to make her a wise Latina justice of the Supreme Court.

Barack Obama feels able to counsel others – most recently Armenians and Turks – to work through their pasts “in a way that is honest, open and constructive.” Otherwise, he cautions, unresolved history “can be …

Good Hair
Like most blacks in America, I was raised in an environment where hair like mine, kinky hair, was called “bad hair.”  Straight hair or kink-less hair was “good hair.” I grew up receiving messages …

Wednesday afternoon, Glenn Beck and two of his guests argued that Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party were “left wing”; that “political correctness” led the committed white supramacist, James Von Brunn, to shoot a security …

Per capita, the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any industrialized nation in the world. Over 2.3 million Americans are living behind bars or under conditions where the state oversees their conduct.
Crime …

In Philadelphia, it is time for a new district attorney. The current D.A. Lynne Abraham is retiring, and none too soon – after 18 years in the position, she has been called “America’s deadliest D.A.” …

President Barack Obama has done a symbolically extraordinary thing by nominating for the first time in U.S. history a person of Latino descent to the Supreme Court. The president has stayed true to the theme …

Meet one of the “winners” from the Association for Alternative Newsweeklies 2009 awards. The above inflammatory PW cover art is for the AAN award-winning article Hater Nation, an article on an anonymous letter received by …

Klansman and Nazi David Duke was arrested in Prague, Czech Republic, the last week of April 2009: it is a crime to deny the Holocaust. In Germany and Austria, it is a crime to …

“It ain’t right,” the man with the soft, desert cowboy drawl says slowly into the phone. “These folks are human beings and he treats ‘em like swine. Well, actually, Joe treats everyone who ain’t white …

The City of Los Angeles is about to unveil its brand new “state-of-the-art,” world-class headquarters for what it considers its world-class law enforcement agency. Just know there’s one too many “world-class” attributes in that last …

ACLU Pasadena Public Forum
“Will we face the torture chambers in our cities as well as on Guantanamo?”
Tuesday, May 12, 7 p.m.
Neigbhorhood Church
301 North Orange Grove Boulevard
Pasadena, California
Hear two of the SF8 tell their story of …

The tea parties that recently took place around the country were billed as a grassroots, bottom-up groundswell against taxes, big government and bailouts. Fox News, apparently promoting itself as the official teabag network, hopes …

A global conference devoted to addressing racism is having trouble attracting an audience. The event, slated to take place in South Africa next week, boasts Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a plenary speaker — and …

So I went to the scene of the crime yesterday afternoon that left a teenage girl dead and a 30-year-old paraplegic arrested for murder.
If I’d driven by too fast, I’d have missed the small makeshift …

Troy Davis faces execution for the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail in Georgia, despite a strong claim of innocence. 7 out of 9 witnesses have recanted or contradicted …

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 …

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” …

For many years, African Americans were perceived as being ignorant creatures incapable of thinking and successfully holding leadership positions and roles. However, African Americans are constantly defying this perception and reaching heights beyond any individual’s …

Equal Access, Equal Justice
Rejecting Post-Raciality: An Ode to the Life of John Hope Franklin. Franklin proved that within our story is America’s story and America “Negro problem” was a refusal to acknowledge the equality of …

Avoiding the Greater Depression
New York, City of the Poor. This city that never sleeps, and others, will experience economic and social death without a vibrant middle class and viable opportunities to earn a living. –David …

Young men who are re-entering society from prison can’t find work. Recent studies on prisoner re-entry suggest that, in California, nearly 400 prisoners, A DAY, are being released into the community, with 70% to 90% of them being unemployed because only 20% of the state’s employers are willing to hire persons with convictions (no matter how long ago).

Last week, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) weighed in to express his outrage at the lack of government control which led to the AIG bailout scandal. This isn’t the first time that Sessions has expressed …

The passing of Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police, Kenny Garner, has left a stunned community pondering the question, “Who do we call now, when we want answers from LAPD?” Kenny Garner was a friend …

“You can’t write that about the president of the NAACP.”
“Write what?” I said.
“That,” Melissa told me, pointing at my notebook’s …

Famed legal scholar, civil rights attorney and author, Lani Guinier, spoke at Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union 2009. The first black woman tenured professor at Harvard Law School, Ms Guinier has authored …

The Republican Party put all its business in the streets as talk radio rhetorician, Rush Limbaugh, went on the offensive (even more than he’s been on the offensive since Obama has taken office) at the …

Recently, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the New York Post, personally apologized for a recent cartoon by Sean Delonas, nicknamed by some “the Picasso of Prejudice”. The cartoon, which depicted a chimpanzee being shot by the …

The New York Post issued a “sideways” explanation (I really wouldn’t call it an apology) on a provocative and highly incendiary political cartoon it ran on February 18th. Combining two news events of the day, …

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 …

This week, the most venerable of civil rights organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, more commonly known as the NAACP, turns 100 years old. Founded on Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday (February …

A life can be a work of art, but like art, there are  standards to meet before it can be classified as
“art”. A life that is a “work of art” has to do something pretty …

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 …

The nation’s most abusive, and aggrieved law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles Police Department, is still “doin’ what it do” as it presented its response this week to a racial profiling study released to its …

On this 80th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as I look at the state of human rights in the world I ask myself, “What would Dr. King do?”
Look at the …

In the summer of 2006 I attended the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. One of the guest presenters was 95-year-old Johnnie Carr, the woman who …

The announcement that syndicated talk radio host, Larry Elder, was leaving his daily radio “squawk show” shouldn’t go without notice. Elder is a major remnant of the “colorblind” conservative movement that allowed race and race-based …

The polls had hardly closed, it seemed, before the punditry of print and blogosphere were positively a-twitter at the possibility that Barack Obama’s near-landslide victory is both substance and symbol of the happy reality that …

by H. Scott Prosterman –

It made me feel a lot better to see that picture of Jesse Jackson crying on Election Night; not just “welling up” like Donovon McNabb admitted to, but really crying. That’s …

The day we all thought we’d never see became a reality this week as the nation took a major step toward racial reconciliation in entrusting the country’s national government to a black man.
President-elect Barack Obama, …

“Tool up.”
“They’re buying racks and racks of ammunition. There were spots where there was none left.”
“You better have a security plan in place.”
These were not words uttered in a frontier dialect from the lips of …

by Carl Bloice –

Just a small group of brothers sitting around at my place watching the Oakland Raiders lose again. During a commercial break, the subject of the next week’s election came up. “Seriously, would …

They should have played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” when Barak Obama was elected president of the United States.
It’s a song about a defining moment in the Civil War that saw the old …

I want a girl like Sarah Silverman. She’s as pretty as Sarah Palin, much funnier, a lot smarter and she’s a nice . . . girl. Plus, she’s got what it takes to …

Much ado has been made over Georgia Congressman John Lewis’ statement about the nasty turn the Presidential campaign took at Republican rallies. From Palin saying Obama was “pallin’ around with domestic terrorists, to Republican rally …

When the circus act of Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain whipped up crowds into a seething frenzy, where was the US Secret Service? That is the group designated to protect all four candidates (and the …

A recent study of voter fears shows that a large percentage of white, Democratic voters won’t vote for Barack Obama because his is black. The study reprises patterns that have driven race relations in business …

Not 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 …

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 …