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Fear of a Black Gun Owner
(The Root) — It may seem hard to believe, but the modern-day gun-rights debate was born from the civil rights era and inspired by the Black Panthers. Equally surprising is that the National Rifle Association — now an aggressive lobbying arm for gun manufacturers — actually once supported, and helped write, federal gun-control laws. In…
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Is This the End of Stop and Frisk?
(The Root) — New York City’s stop-and-frisk program has exploded by 600 percent under Mayor Michael Bloomberg — garnering outrage from critics who believe that the practice forces black and Latino residents to live under a separate-and-unequal police state, subject to random violations of their Fourth Amendment constitutional right against unreasonable search and seizure. Though…
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How Will Obama Handle the War on Drugs?
(The Root) — Between now and the inauguration on Jan. 21, The Root will be taking a daily look at the president’s record on a number of policy issues, including his first-term accomplishments and what many Americans hope to see him accomplish in a second term. Today: the war on drugs. See previous postings in…
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The Year Democrats Got Their Groove Back
(The Root) — In 2012 the nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, proved to be the ultimate comeback kid. After being vilified by his Republican opposition, the president won a surprisingly decisive re-election. A rainbow coalition of Asian Americans, Hispanics, white progressives and independents joined forces with a solid African-American constituency to deliver a victory.…
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Gun Control: Ask Shooting Victim's Mom
(The Root) — America the beautiful, with all its celebration of democratic freedoms, has become a place where children are gunned down in their first-grade classrooms, and teenagers are killed walking home with Skittles and iced tea. The latest blight on the nation’s social consciousness is a massacre of unconscionable proportion: A lone gunman, identified…
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Blacks' Evolving Views of Gay Marriage
(The Root) — In the 1967 landmark case Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court settled the question of whether love was colorblind in the eyes of the law. By invalidating anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized marriages between blacks and whites, the court acknowledged that the foundational right to “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” transcended…
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What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?
(The Root) — In January 2004, then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama declared that “the war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws … we need to rethink how we’re operating in the drug war.” As president, Obama has acknowledged the high price paid by the black…
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On Jordan Davis' Senseless Death
(The Root) — Just weeks after President Obama’s triumphant re-election, an all-too-familiar story emerges to remind us that, despite the ascendance of one black man to the White House, we do not live in a postracial, colorblind society. On Nov. 23, Jordan Russell Davis, a black, 17-year-old high school student in Florida, was shot and…
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Obama's Mandate to Help the Poor
(The Root) — President Obama’s landslide victory on Nov. 6 was won amid a culture war between the haves and have-nots. Republican candidate Mitt Romney openly admitted that he wasn’t “concerned about the very poor,” and he privately derided the “47 percent” of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes, claiming they should learn to…
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The Multiracial Face of the Democratic Party
(The Root) — For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And so today it seems almost serendipitous that the xenophobic campaign employed to undermine and delegitimize President Obama laid the very seeds of the GOP’s electoral demise on Nov. 6, 2012. Obama’s Electoral College victory of 332 to 206 was achieved because…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
