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Obama vs. Romney: Who's Out of Touch?
(The Root) — Nearly a week ago, during a late-morning press conference at the White House, President Obama talked candidly about the economy, noting that in the last three years we’ve added about 4.3 million jobs — roughly one-fifth of them this year alone. Then he said, “The private sector is doing fine.” In case…
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Does Romney Get the Other America?
(The Root) — Last week presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign caravan rolled up to the Universal Bluford Charter School in West Philadelphia. He used the occasion to talk with cherry-picked black school administrators, community leaders and teachers about education reform. In many ways, it was Romney’s official introduction to urban America. With the cameras…
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Obama's Gay-Marriage Evolution, at Last
Just when certain progressives thought that President Obama lacked the audacity to lead, he publicly endorsed, in a television interview taped Wednesday, the right of gay Americans to marry. It’s a bold shift, especially coming one day after a majority of voters in North Carolina, a key battleground state in this November’s elections, supported a…
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Entrepreneurs Keep HBCUs Afloat
Sometime in the early ’80s, before I turned 10, my grandmother told me: “You should go to Howard.” In our family, Howard University was this revered place, partly because one of my uncles had been a quarterback there in the late ’70s. But I dismissed the idea, almost as fiercely as I resisted football, having…
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Smiley and West: Still Fighting for the Poor
If there’s any doubt that the economic crisis persists, consider the takeaways from recent headlines: The official unemployment rate remains 8.2 percent. One in six Americans — nearly 52 million people — receives food stamps, even as Republican legislators in Washington and state capitals push austere cuts to social programs. In a Gallup survey released…
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Don't Believe the Economy Hype
In a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House last Thursday, President Obama signed a bipartisan measure intended to help expand entrepreneurs’ access to money — and, ultimately, create jobs. The affair drew plenty of favorable headlines for the JOBS Act (the noncreative acronym for Jumpstart Our Business Startups), and in some ways provided a…
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On Blacks, Guns and History
One of the earliest scenes of the Autobiography of Malcolm X takes us to the Lansing, Mich., of 1929. Malcolm’s father, Earl Little, a Baptist minister derided as “uppity” for aspiring to own a store and live outside the city’s traditional black neighborhoods, shot a pistol one night at a pair of white men who’d…
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Trayvon Martin: Time for a Gun-Policy Debate
The tragic case of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy fatally shot in a suburban Orlando, Fla., neighborhood last month, has rightly galvanized certain quarters of the country. It has become a symbolic commentary on race, class and justice. But it should also offer a window into a larger, universal question: Where is the meaningful gun-policy…
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Remember, the South Has Black Voters, Too
In the Gulf Coast town of Lafayette, La., Tuesday night, Rick Santorum boasted of winning the Mississippi and Alabama presidential primaries and flatly dismissed doubts that his improbable bid could match Mitt Romney’s well-financed machine. “This is a grassroots campaign,” Santorum told supporters, adding, “Who would have ever thought, in the age of media we…
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Out-of-Touch Romney: Move Back to Detroit
Picture it: Mitt Romney’s Boston campaign headquarters, in a post-Super Tuesday strategy session. Everyone’s high on Tuesday’s six-state sweep. They’re sitting around a conference table, trading ideas on how to add a dash of pepper-jack ranch dressing to a campaign that’s as blandly risk averse as an iceberg wedge salad. Primary goals: Knock off Rick…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
