Search results for: “node/Science”
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The American Embrace of Ignorance, and Why Blacks Need to Let Go.
Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with learning and those who pursue it. We are a nation that has made free public education a birthright, but we pay teachers the lowest salaries of any group of college-educated professionals. In the last two presidential elections, we’ve chosen a man of less-than-mediocre intellect whose thinking is…
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Thug Life on the Campaign Trail
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has leveled an odd charge against Barack Obama. He accuses the Illinois senator’s campaign of trying to hijack the Democratic presidential nomination by arguing it has a stronger claim on the nomination because Obama has more pledged delegates than Sen. Hillary Clinton and larger percentage of the popular vote. Wilentz argues…
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Race in America: Caught Between Healing and Bitterness
Today most Americans tell themselves that we as a nation are finally beyond race. Or at least nearly so. Wake up! All the hope and self-delusion aside, racism runs much deeper than most Americans realize. Indeed, a sign of the depth of this fissure has emerged in the current Democratic presidential campaign. The last few…
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Confessions of a Black Feminist
In 1975, my parents’ marriage ended. My mother and I moved to Atlanta where Maynard Jackson opened Atlanta as the gateway to the New South. For the first six months, we lived near the intersection of Bankhead Highway and I-285, in what is now called the Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway Corridor – a place made…
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Was it Too Little, Too Late?
It was an amazing speech, a brilliant speech. It was brilliant both in substance and in delivery. He told a convincing, moving story about his own racial history. He was able to paint a truly hopeful, but pragmatic, picture of why people should come together across races. He attempted to explain why he would not…
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Is Obama Wrong About Wright?
Senator Obama is mistaken. The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who is the Obama family’s pastor and the subject of recent fierce attacks in the media, is not, as Obama has stated, that “he has a lot of the…baggage of those times,” (those times being the 1960s). The problem is also not,…
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No Time For Smoked-Filled Rooms
Several weeks ago we were presented with the surreal specter of two iconic figures from the civil rights movement battling each other in the name of “democracy.” Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, wrote a letter in early February to the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) demanding that the delegates “elected” by…
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Could an Obama Win Backfire on Blacks?
Abigail Thernstrom, the conservative commentator on race in the U.S., once called me a member of the “doom and gloom” contingent among black political scholars. So, that probably makes me overqualified to make this assertion, but here goes. An Obama presidency could seriously backfire on African Americans. It is true that should Barack Obama become…
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So You Wanna Fight Dirty?
This is a dirty campaign and since Senator Barack Obama won’t say it, I will. The media has not been unfair to Senator Clinton, they have been extremely soft. There are elephants in the room that need to be addressed. Can anyone say Whitewater? How about impeachment? Let’s not forget Osama bin Laden. You can…
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He’s Black and We’re Proud
It is supremely ironic that Barack Obama, the candidate who seeks to bury race as an issue in this campaign season, owes his overwhelming support among blacks to the continued power of black nationalism. For a century and a half, black nationalism has provided the main ideological challenge to the liberal, social democratic sensibilities that…