culture

(The Root) — Race is one of those subjects that can get you quick-flash-fried in American public life. Like a small drumstick dropped into a boiling cauldron of grease, a public figure can be burned to a crisp in seconds. From Al Campanis, Jesse Jackson and Don Imus to Trent Lott, Reverend Jeremiah Wright and…

Keith B. Richburg, China correspondent at the Washington Post and a native of Detroit, reminsces about the city’s glory days and the reasons for its long slide into blight and decay.  My heart aches today knowing that my beloved home town of Detroit now has the notoriety of being the largest American city to officially…

(The Root) — A famous quotation, which is often stated and attributed to many, is: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” When a jury of George Zimmerman’s peers acquitted him of second-degree murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., many advocates in the black community were…

(Special to The Root) — A few years ago in fall 2011, I was staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. This is the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have finished writing his famous “I Have a Dream” speech before delivering it the next day at the Washington Memorial on…

Contending that the jury was right not to convict George Zimmerman of second-degree murder based on the law and that Trayvon Martin’s death was a profound injustice, The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that two “conflicting truths emerge” in trying to evaluate Trayvon Martin’s shooting death. In trying to assess the killing of Trayvon Martin by…

In a piece at Truthdig, columnist Richard Reeves explores the intersection of race and American pop culture through the lens of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Reeves argues that the shooting stemmed, in part, from Florida’s arcane concealed-weapons law. … What happened was a crime and the acquitted shooter, Zimmerman,…

The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson says that although the nation should talk honestly about unresolved racial issues, President Obama is likely the wrong candidate to lead the discussion, because some people see him as threatening. The need for what diplomats call a “full and frank exchange of views” is obvious. Many Americans don’t even agree…

(The Root) — “It’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said at the 2013 NAACP convention on Tuesday in Orlando, Fla., referring to the “Stand your ground” laws in place in more than 30 states. In reaction to…

(The Root) — “My great-great-grandfather was named Issac Rowen. He came from Guinea to work as a fisherman sometime in the post-Civil War period. My late great-aunt told me that he came to the U.S. with a group of white men. He worked as a fisherman in New Orleans until was killed, by being thrown…