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Poor White Cash: GOP and Food Stamps
(The Root) — The Republican Party is engaged in class warfare against poor and middle-class white Americans. It is a little-discussed fact but an ironic one worth noting, since those are the very same people who elect them. This week, House Republicans passed a nutrition bill that eliminates $39 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance…
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Gun Control: If Not Now, When?
(The Root) — This week in the nation’s capital, 12 innocent people were massacred as a crazed gunman used a Remington 12-gauge shotgun to rain down terror upon a lobby of unsuspecting Navy yard employees who were having breakfast and beginning their day. This is the face of freedom and Second Amendment rights in America’s…
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Supporting Obama's New Syria Strategy
(The Root) — On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama laid out the moral argument for an international, multilateral coalition to respond to the alleged Aug. 21 gas attack by the Syrian government on its own citizens. The speech came in the midst of a rapidly moving diplomatic crisis. Just over a week ago, it seemed…
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Using Humor in the Dialogue on Race
(The Root) — “W. Kamau Bell is one of America’s few leftist black male feminists from San Francisco with his own television talk show, and for that alone he should be treasured,” Salon wrote last year. He’s also a straight, married young dad who’s an outspoken proponent of marriage equality and gay rights. Welcome to…
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Syria and the Irony of GOP Obstructionism
(The Root) — What is so blaringly disturbing about the recent debate over whether the United States should engage militarily in Syria’s civil war — and the call for congressional debate and action — is the complete lack of acknowledgment that America has been fighting its own intellectual civil war for five years. The Republican…
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Daniel Maree: Leader of a Million Hoodies
(The Root) — America is experiencing a 21st-century civil rights movement, and with it comes new leaders. “There’s a reason why so many who marched that day and in the days to come were young,” President Obama said Wednesday on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. “For the young are unconstrained by habits…
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MLK III: Father's Dream Still Unfulfilled
(The Root) — On Aug. 28, 2008, 45 years to the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, the slain leader’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and celebrated the ascendance of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. King said that his father would be “proud…
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Bernice King: Dream Defender
(The Root) — On an historic day in August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered these words on the state of racial affairs in America a century after the Emancipation Proclamation: “One hundred years later the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled…
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Can Bill de Blasio Usher in a New NYC?
(The Root) — Imagine a world in which a white man running for mayor of New York City could say, “I have a son who looks like Trayvon.” Bill de Blasio is such a man. And it is the layered nuances of that simple yet deeply personal and important fact that may well help win…
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Why the Right Cheers Zimmerman Verdict
(The Root) — The killing of an unarmed teenage boy isn’t something you’d expect to be political. You would certainly never expect it to inspire gleeful adulation from any American of supposedly “good conscience.” But it appears that some Republicans — and prominent conservative talking heads in particular — have developed a metastasizing form of “Obama…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
