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Can Democrats Win Black Votes Without Republican Racism?
Ever since President Barack Obama took office, a pretty reliable pattern has emerged: On a regular basis someone will say, write or tweet something racist about the president and the media will cover it—including yours truly. Someone apologizes for the remark (or doesn’t), and someone else distances himself or his organization from the offender in…
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Why Google Should Call Some Black Friends
Google just did something few tech companies have shown interest in doing: It seriously confronted the issue of diversity—or, rather, its lack thereof. The company issued a report on its workforce diversity, and let’s just say, if it had wanted to, the report could have been summarized as follows: “When it comes to Latino and…
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New Study Shows We’re Not Post-Racial When It Comes to Hiring Decisions
A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research reinforces a reality that many of us have long understood and that is well-documented: African-American unemployment has been nearly double that of white Americans throughout much of the last five years. What has not been as widely covered is that racial disparities in unemployment…
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Bipartisan Backlash Against Police Commissioner’s N-Bomb Shows There’s Still Hope for America
On Monday, Robert Copeland—the Wolfeboro, N.H., police commissioner who admitted to calling President Barack Obama the n-word and refusing to apologize—resigned. And while it’s unlikely that he’ll be missed, I, for one, am actually somewhat relieved that our nation endured the Copeland saga. Here’s why: Throughout much of Obama’s tenure in office, we have been…
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Sherri Shepherd’s Divorce: Is It a Wake-Up Call for Women?
Though she and her co-hosts regularly discuss the marital woes of other celebrities on their daytime talk show, The View, in recent days Sherri Shepherd has been noticeably silent about the relationship problems of one particular celebrity: her. Multiple outlets have reported that Shepherd’s husband of three years, Lamar Sally, filed separation papers with Shepherd and…
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When a Police Commissioner Calls Obama the N-Word, It’s Time for Mandatory Diversity Training
Here we go again. Someone in a position of authority has said something racist. More specifically, something racist about President Barack Obama, and gotten caught. Only this time the person didn’t make a fried-chicken or watermelon joke, or call the commander in chief “boy.” He actually used the n-word. And did I mention this authority…
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Dutchman: Black Men and White Women, Controversial Onstage—and, Still, in Real Life?
When Amiri Baraka’s best-known play, Dutchman, opened in 1964, it was critically acclaimed and quite controversial. At the height of the civil rights movement, while black Americans were struggling for the right to vote and attend the same schools as white Americans, here was a play depicting a sexually aggressive white woman attempting to seduce…
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Where Was All of This Leslie Jones Haterade When Chris Rock Did His Slavery Joke?
Saturday Night Live writer Leslie Jones’ recent on-air appearance on the iconic sketch show has sparked outrage among those who have argued that when it comes to comedy, certain topics should be off-limits, including slavery—the subject of Jones’ remarks. In case you missed it, she did a bit Saturday night describing how, as a taller black…
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What Kerry Washington Can Teach Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian
Kerry Washington did something shocking a couple of weeks ago: She reached one of life’s major milestones—giving birth to her beautiful baby girl—but she didn’t publicize it. She didn’t tweet, Instagram or Facebook it. She didn’t leak it to People magazine. And somehow, in our social media-saturated age, the Scandal star decided that she didn’t…
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Cliven Bundy’s Black ‘Bodyguard’ and the Black-Friend Defense
We’ve all heard it so many times that it’s officially a cliché—everyone who says something that offends a particular group manages to conveniently claim that he has a “friend” in that group—and it’s supposed to be definitive proof that he can’t really be racist, sexist, homophobic or insert-whatever-phobic. The gold standard cliché among all of…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
