The Miami Herald‘s Leonard Pitts Jr. checks in our growing tendency to focus on our screens instead of at what’s in front of us. The observation comes after the recent incident when San Francisco commuters were so engrossed in technology that they missed a man brandishing a handgun then shooting a passenger in the head.…

“This is for four women who are not here,” Leonard Pitts Jr. writes at the Miami Herald in an evocative reflection on the lives of the four little girls who died in the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing. He pays homage to the accomplishments they were never able to achieve due to racial hatred. It is…

Leonard Pitts Jr., at the Miami Herald, asks pointed questions about race in America as the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. “What have you chosen not to see?” he asks. “What will you do to make it right?” This is “tomorrow.” Meaning that unknowable future whose unknowable difficulties Martin Luther…

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. tackles what he calls McDonald’s insulting budget advice, ostensibly aimed at helping minimum-wage workers, who have been fighting for higher pay. “If there is one thing poor people do not need, it is lessons in how to be poor,” he says. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. As fast food workers…

The 60-year-old airline passenger’s recent attack on a toddler is as American as monster trucks, writes Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., arguing that his animus toward black people is woven through the fabric of our law, economics, health care, education, news media and culture. … So now, Jonah has received a lesson in How…

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. dismantles and dismisses an argument by conservatives that there might not have been a need for the civil rights movement if blacks had had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense. Rush Limbaugh thinks John Lewis should have been armed. “If a lot of African-Americans back…

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. says that Nazis have become the “go-to image of political demonization.” President Barack Obama has even been portrayed as Hitler. The comparisons have to stop because they trivialize the sheer awfulness of the murderous regime.  John Raese is feeling persecuted. Raese, a West Virginia businessman running for the Senate,…

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. examines race and privilege in the death of Trayvon Martin, saying that being white means having one’s personhood and individuality respected, a privilege so basic that he doubts it registers with many as a privilege at all. I’m here to explain why George Zimmerman is white. This seems necessary…

Leonard Pitts Jr. writes in his Miami Herald column that the Obama administration’s policy allowing the killing of terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, should give us all pause. He argues that it stands in defiance of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits governments from depriving people of life, liberty or property without due process of…

Leonard Pitts Jr. writes at the Sacramento Bee that the recent announcement about the cancellation of TLC network’s All-American Muslim reality series shows that America still has a long way to go toward understanding the culture after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. The community needed cultural ambassadors like those represented in the show to…