In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding Grambling State football players’ protests over school conditions, Brittney Cooper explores at Salon how massive Republican-driven budget cuts have endangered the welfare of this Louisiana school and other HBCUs. I grew up down the road from Grambling, and learned my appreciation for black college football and band culture,…

In Salon magazine, Brittney Cooper argues that because laws don’t do enough to protect women like Marissa Alexander from their violent husbands, women often find themselves in dangerous situations where they are forced to protect themselves.  In Marissa Alexander’s case, she inadvertently encountered her husband, a man against whom she had a restraining order, when she went…

The House Republicans’ recent vote to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program is a demonstration of their animosity toward Americans of color, Brittney Cooper argues in a piece for Salon. Cooper describes how the Republican Party, beginning in the Kennedy era, intentionally manufactured the myth of a lazy African-American subgroup that does not…

ln light of intractable racist attitudes that are repeatedly expressed in heinous encounters across the nation, Brittney Cooper writes at Salon that America is a long ways away from becoming postracial, despite accomplishments by blacks like President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. The 50th anniversary of the 16th Street church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., was sandwiched…

Arguing at Salon that public education has always been a pathway to the middle class for people of color, Brittney Cooper chides Republican lawmakers for creating barriers to success for minorities by defunding urban school systems at every level across the nation. “Unfortunately, the increasing national disdain for all things ‘public’ is increasingly becoming a…

At Salon, Brittney Cooper urges the media and the black community to end unrelenting attacks on black women, following the uproar surrounding the now-pulled “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape” video on Russell Simmons’ YouTube network. “With a scarily consistent frequency,” she writes, “black women’s political histories and needs are not only minimized but utterly discounted in…

Responding to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that found that 40 percent of white people and 25 percent of nonwhites have no friends of another race, Brittney Cooper writes at Salon that it cuts both ways. “All of my close friends are black,” she says, explaining that maintaining white friendships is too much of a struggle.…