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How Employer Credit Checks Are Keeping Black People Unemployed
When New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that his office had cut a deal with the three big credit bureaus—Experian, Equifax and TransUnion—to improve the customer experience, the news shook the financial-services world into a frenzy. “In today’s world, the consumer’s input is less important than the bank or collector’s input,” John…
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Can We Get Some More Black Senators and Governors?
Little-known fact: The crab state of Maryland has one of the highest percentages of black population in the United States. Theoretically, you might think that that would make the state one of the more powerful black political blocs in the land. Yet while the state is nearly 33 percent African American, it’s never had an African-American governor…
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Why Do We Still Need the Voting Rights Act? Here’s Why
It’s never too hard to feel as if you’re having your political power snatched away from you. But the real challenge is proving it—all there in one accessible place, all by the numbers. As we reach the 50th-anniversary mark of Selma, Ala.’s “Bloody Sunday”—the indisputable tipping point that got the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed—the debate…
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Yeah, We Do Need More Black Cops
In a recent first-time national interview, during which he openly discussed the tragic shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of a troubled white cop, Cleveland’s black police chief, Calvin Williams, strangely snapped back at the notion of more black cops. “Diversity is always at the forefront of what I’m trying to do…
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Giuliani Says Obama Doesn’t Love America: Here’s Why He Keeps Running His Mouth
The two-term former mayor of New York City who couldn’t even make it through the first quarter of a Republican presidential primary just called the two-term president of the United States un-American. Digging into his bag of bigoted ad-libs, Rudy Giuliani couldn’t help scratching his racist itch during a recent “off-the-record” fundraising dinner for 2016…
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Coming to Grips With the Socioeconomic Conditions That Fuel Terrorism
Let’s go out on a limb, sit down and think for a moment, and assume that State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf is right: that if we spent more time figuring out ways to eliminate youth unemployment and global poverty, we’d be spending less energy (and money) worried about decapitation-happy barbarians at the gates. “We cannot…
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How Republicans Could Sabotage the 1st Black Female Attorney General Nominee
If it weren’t for all this snow falling in the nation’s capital, you’d probably catch a glimpse of that perfect storm brewing over President Barack Obama’s now-famous executive order on immigration reform. It has, once again, emerged as a point of contention on the salted streets between Capitol Hill and the White House, with the…
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Black Families Wrestle With End-of-Life Decisions
With the pop-verse watching, Whitney Houston’s 21-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, is on life support in a suburban Atlanta hospital. Multiple questions loom about everything from her current medical condition to why, exactly, her family doesn’t want “husband/boyfriend” Nick Gordon by her side. While acknowledging that her niece is still on a respirator, Bobbi Kristina’s…
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How About Someone Black as ‘the Most Trusted Man, or Woman, in America’?
The fake-sack, kill-him-softly, no-pay suspension of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was enough legally sanctioned and blatant white privilege to last us a lifetime of “say what.” Chickens came home to roost, as the saying goes. As a result, maybe NBC executives could do a bit of paradigm shifting by simply giving a person…
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How Many People Get Hurt if Republicans Get Rid of Obamacare?
A lot of smart people have accumulated quite a bit of data showing how many people, and who specifically, have benefited from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. But new questions abound about how many people could be hurt if the law were suddenly stripped away. That’s the biggest of…
