15 Incidents That Remind Us How Close We Still Are To Jim Crow America
Legal Experts: How U.S. Supreme Court’s Ruling on ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Will Make Things Worse For Black Americans
If You Thought You Knew Everything About Prince, Here Are Some Things That Will Shock You
A Fan Wanted a Photo With One of His Favorite Rappers, Who Instead Takes Him Hostage
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Does Race Trump Gender?
Oprah Winfrey has been widely criticized by white feminists who saw her decision to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton as a betrayal that put race before gender. Oprah’s pointed response spoke for many black women whose loyalty to gender and race is also being questioned — and tested. “You know, after Iowa, there were…
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Seeing Green In Africa
Last week, much of the world was focused on Microsoft’s attempt to shape the Internet with its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. But just a week earlier, without nearly as much fanfare, Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced his new retirement project that could alter the lives of millions throughout Africa and other parts of the…
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Old School Jams Meet New School Politics
It was “Hot Ice” night at Sugar Hill Lounge in Atlanta’s Underground entertainment district, but the usual Saturday offering of live R&B and reggae music gave way to a more urgent purpose: Drumming up black voter turnout for today’s Georgia’s presidential primary. Billed as a non-partisan, multi-generational Wake Up Call/Town Hall Party for Hope, Change…
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Hopeless Boomers? We Invented Hope
In a recent article on Sen. Ted Kennedy’s powerful endorsement of Barack Obama, New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests that Baby Boomers who developed their political identities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who have hardened over decades of political conflict, are intrinsically devoid of hope. Instead, the Camelot mystique of the…
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Winning by a Hair
After much prompting by women, the national media, and the African American community, I, speaking on behalf of “my own,” am now comfortable in declaring the candidate I support to be the 44th president of the United States. As I am frequently reminded, I am black and I am a woman. And, given African Americans’…
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Not My Brand of Hope
From the beginning of his presidential campaign, which unofficially began with the release of his second book The Audacity of Hope, Senator Barack Obama has been positioned as an underdog against the Clinton machine. Now, with polls showing him in a virtual dead heat with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the media has constructed his early success…
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Black America Mobilizes on AIDS. Finally.
I’ve been trying to get black folks to pay attention to the AIDS epidemic in our community for over twenty years. In the last few months I’ve learned everything I need to know about mobilizing black folk, and I owe it all to Barack Obama. In October, polls showed that black voters backed Hillary Clinton…
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Shake-up in Shaker
“Do you live in the good ‘hood or the bad ‘hood?” The question came by email. A friend who lives in my native North Carolina was reading a New York Times article about Shaker Heights, Ohio, where I live. She wanted to know if I was safe. The Times story recounted the brutal, New Year’s…