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Another Chance for Troy Davis
Troy Davis, whose death row case has won the support of international luminaries from Susan Sarandon to Jimmy Carter to Desmond Tutu, has faced near-execution many times. And each time he’s been granted a last-minute delay—last fall’s stay came just two hours before Davis was scheduled to die. On Monday, the Georgia man was granted…
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Health Care Reform: A Pissed-Off Nation
Media outlets have gingerly approached the question of whether the virulent and over-the-top town hall meetings over health care are thinly disguised venting sessions in which right-wing whites express their frustration and sense of dislocation over the election of the first black president. Following quickly on the heels of the out-in-left-field, birther conspiracy theorists, the…
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A Summer of Race Talk Gone Bad
Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the first Latina Supreme Court justice. The Cambridge police dropped the charges against Professor Henry “Skip” Gates, an action supported by the mounting evidence that he was the subject of a false and racially charged arrest. But without a doubt, this has been a bad summer for conversations on race. It…
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Please, Professor Gates!
In an interview with The Root after the ordeal of his arrest in his home in Cambridge, this week Harvard professor (and The Root’s editor-in-chief) Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. announced his intention to make a PBS special about race and the criminal justice system. It would bring welcome attention to an important and still…
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Hearings Through the Looking Glass
“I am a Brooklynite, born and bred—a first-generation American on my father’s side, barely second-generation on my mother’s.” —Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg I am who I am in the first place because of my parents . . . My father was brought to this country as an infant. . . He grew up in poverty.…
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Eyes Off the Prize
Like millions of others, I’m still deeply moved by the wonderfully rich memorial service for Michael Jackson. But I can’t help but wonder whether Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, is doing Michael Jackson, her constituents or black folks a favor when she promises to bring to the floor what will be a controversial resolution deeming Jackson…
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European Soccer’s Racist Present
Soccer teams from all over the world are playing right now in South Africa in the Confederations Cup—the group of matches leading up to next year’s World Cup in South Africa. But as teams prepare for 2010’s historic World Cup, the first on the African continent, an important legal case is unfolding in a courtroom…
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Bound Men
If you’re the author of a book called Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, one would expect that you would be humbly engaged in the task of explaining why you got it all wrong and that you’d lay off the bold predictions for a while. But maybe that’s too much…
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Don’t Racists Ever Get Tired?
When a Department of Homeland Security report in April predicted a rise in white supremacist violence by white men who feel increasingly marginalized and powerless, Republican leaders were up in arms. The report, they said, was a slur on the U.S. military because it explored the possibility that white supremacist violence might arise from the…
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Supremes Rule: Justice Can’t Be Bought
Caperton v. Massey is one of the 5-4 squeakers that the Supreme Court got right. It is a case that may not make the front page of many newspapers, but in its own way may be as crucial as the upcoming decisions in several Voting Rights Act and affirmative action cases. Caperton put before the…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
