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Rethinking Affirmative Action at Colleges
It’s official: The Supreme Court will be revisiting the grand old issue of affirmative action this year. Abigail Fisher, who is white, is arguing that her grades and test scores would have admitted her to the University of Texas if she were black or Latino. The larger issue, as always, is racism. Does racism justify…
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The Real Problem With Roland Martin's Tweets
Roland Martin doesn’t understand the nature of taboo. More specifically, he doesn’t get that prominent black people have a special responsibility to understand taboo in America. To wit: In American English, there are precisely two words that qualify as profane. I don’t mean the “bad words” that tend to have four letters, the most common…
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Segregation Is Down. Great News, Right?
When Newt Gingrich says that housing project people don’t work, our job is to show that they do. When he says that Obama is the “food stamp” president, our job is to show that most food stamp recipients are white. When Ron Paul writes that we’re about to start rioting again, we are to make…
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Santorum's Black-Poverty Solution Works
The Republican candidates have offered no end of fodder for those dedicated to stamping out tacky statements on race. We seem to get almost one a week. There was Newt Gingrich hoping that poor brown kids will work after school while white ones in the suburbs lounge around. Absurd, I agree. Similarly dismissible are Ron…
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Maya Angelou's Lesson About Black Speech
Maya Angelou’s dismay that Common uses the n-word on The Dreamer/The Believer, the album he had her participate in, is understandable in itself. However, in her initial reaction (they appear to have cleared the air since then), she may actually have forgotten a lesson that she herself once taught. That lesson was that most black…
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NYPD Facebook Flap Is a Copout
This week the big news on the Racism Watch is the New York City cops who have been discussing on Facebook black attendees of Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Parade in classically unsavory terms: “Animals.” “Savages.” “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” And it would hardly be hasty to assume that terms even…
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Occupy Wall Street and Affirmative Action
The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon has a thing or two to teach us about, of all things, affirmative action. One of those affirmative-action-all-the-time spells will most likely be on us again — soon. Abigail Fisher has appealed to the Supreme Court in her 2008 case against the University of Texas at Austin — denied by…
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Obama's Reefer Madness
Here’s some change you can believe in: The Obama administration is more interested in breaking bread with UFO spotters than with people who understand that it’s ridiculous to treat pot as an illegal substance. It’s bad enough that the administration is blithely continuing its quest to eradicate medical-marijuana dispensaries even in states that have declared…
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There's More Than One Way to Insult Blacks
Herman Cain’s claim that black people who vote Democratic are “brainwashed” was hardly gracious. It is true, one must admit, that our allegiance, so fervent, to one party is not the healthiest thing, whether it’s been a matter of “brainwashing” or not. As long as Democrats don’t have to work for our vote, they won’t…
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We Should Celebrate Our Bilingual President
During President Obama’s address to the Congressional Black Caucus recently, besides riling some columnists with his message, he was, as one might phrase it, dropping some Ebonics. Or especially some g’s, spiritedly advising the assembled to “stop complainin’ ” and “grumblin’.” The audience seemed to like it, but news sources varied on how they recorded…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
