culture

During a brief segment on her MSNBC show on Saturday, Melissa Harris-Perry and reporter Kristen Welker paid tribute to longtime White House journalist Helen Thomas, who passed away at the age 92. Thomas began covering the White House in 1961 when John F. Kennedy was president and served until her retirement in 2010. Before her…

A Michigan county circuit judge on Friday ordered that Detroit’s federal bankruptcy filing be withdrawn because the governor and the city’s emergency manager violated the state constitution, according to the Detroit News. The state has appealed the order.  Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemary Aquilina urged Gov. Rick Snyder to read certain sections of Michigan’s constitution,…

Iran’s foreign ministry entered the growing debate surrounding George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Friday, criticizing the verdict and America for widespread racial discrimination, the Washington Times reports. “The acquittal of the murderer of the teenage African American once again clearly demonstrated the unwritten, but systematic racial…

(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…