Corrupt white politicians facing jail time never had it so good, right? One of the funny but rather glaring and subtly white-privilege things we’ve seen in media coverage of former Gov. Bob McDonnell’s (R-Va.) corruption trial, and the unveiling of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s (R-Ill.) slimy conviction in a case linked to allegations of…

While all eyes were on the predictable results unfolding from Tuesday’s so-called Acela primaries, three major statewide, congressional and local races quietly unfolded that redefined the trajectory of modern African-American politics … at least for the foreseeable future. Tuesday started off with much hope that Maryland—home to one of the nation’s more powerful hubs of…

In our last episode of that ideologically imbalanced Supreme Court we love to hate, the perpetually out-of-touch institution was well on its way to dismantling civil rights law as we know it. Conservatives had successfully skinned the Voting Rights Act down to its bare enforcement essentials in Shelby v. Holder less than three years ago.…

Look out, voting people. The 2016 Democratic presidential primaries have fast become the early-warning detection system on voter-ID laws. And based on what we’ve seen thus far, the electoral weather patterns don’t look so good. Conversations on the expanding voter-ID and voter-suppression franchises have, up to this point, centered on election Armageddon scenarios in the…

Phones buzzed, feeds bubbled and the radio call-in lines lit up when President Barack Obama announced his nominee for the Supreme Court: Merrick Garland. And if you later researched one of those few moments when black folks were universally vexed with their beloved first black president, this would be it: Why on earth did he not…

With the Democratic primary headed to South Carolina and Nevada Feb. 20, now’s the time when you can put some money on the market. Iowa, followed by New Hampshire, offered a juicy appetizer. Yet both were as white and middle-class as a row of picket fences in a Hallmark Channel movie. Bernie Sanders’ once mythical,…

Baltimore: It’s that big-city mayor’s race on the East Coast we had forgotten about until Ferguson, Mo.-inspired protester extraordinaire and symbolic godfather of the Black Lives Matter movement Deray Mckesson dropped onto the political scene with an audacious, blogged announcement of his candidacy for mayor. He’s a native son of Baltimore, doing his hometown proud with…

It’s easy to view the bubbling toxic-water crisis in Flint, Mich., as the case of yet another majority-black city victimized by institutional neglect. Michigan itself is a cautionary tale of once-thriving Northern manufacturing towns, once the heart of black Northern migration, now disintegrating from economic malaise.   But, in reality, Flint serves as a primary example…