Politics
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These Are the Black Folks Skipping Out on the RNC This Year
The Republican National Convention may be noteworthy this year for one glaring reason: who isn’t coming. In the case of African-American Republicans, the list is long. They are joined by a list of former GOP nominees for president who will not attend, which includes past GOP nominees for president Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mitt Romney. While…
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How to Go From #BlackLivesMatter to #BlackPolicyMatters
How do we go from #BlackLivesMatter to changing the policies that devalue black life? This moment feels both full of possibility and also in danger of going unfulfilled. Folks across the political spectrum are finally confronting the issue of police violence, but there’s little consensus about how to fix it. Organizations like Campaign Zero are…
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Donald Trump Picks Mike Pence as His VP and It Probably Won’t Matter
To paraphrase a musical icon gone all too soon, unlike books, black lives and albums, the vice presidential pick really doesn’t matter. However, like a sullen 12-year-old forced to go to his uncle’s wedding, America had to wait with bated breath to see exactly who Donald Trump picked to be his vice presidential nominee. And…
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President Obama Defends Phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ in Unprecedented Town Hall
President Barack Obama led an unprecedented nationally televised town hall meeting on race and the criminal-justice system Thursday night. Black Lives Matter, said Obama, “simply refers to the notion that there’s a specific vulnerability for African Americans that needs to be addressed” and does not denigrate or disparage police officers, white people or any other…
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Hillary Clinton’s Speech May Finally Start That Long-Overdue Conversation on Race
Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, waded into the national crisis of race, democracy and criminal justice with a stirring call for racial justice in Springfield, Ill., on Wednesday. In the city that President Abraham Lincoln once called home, Clinton echoed the iconic president’s warning about the dangers of a “house divided” being…
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#WeWontBeSilent: 2 Things the DOJ Can Do Now to Stop Police Violence
Two more black men became a hashtag on Twitter last week: Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. It’s a modern marker of our times, of an unnatural death publicly witnessed through a cellphone-camera lens. They were both killed by police officers for dubious reasons: They owned guns in states where carrying guns publicly is legal, but…
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Post-Dallas, Could White Fear Turn Tide for Trump?
The political climate had already incubated into the most racially flammable presidential election cycle in recent memory (perhaps more so than when the first black president ran). Throw a lit match of tragic police assassinations by a heavily armed vengeful black man onto it, and it may have just exploded into a summer-surprise inflection point…
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What a Comic Book Reveals About Why John Lewis Led a Congressional Sit-In
Tuesday was the day that U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and other Democrats went back to Congress to figure out what to do next on gun control. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that afternoon that he wasn’t going to reward Democrats for their civil obedience. Honestly, when Lewis, the last survivor from the 1963…
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No Country for Black Voters: Sure, Trump Supporters Don’t Like Us, but Some Clinton Supporters Don’t Either
So, telling us something we already knew, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll pushed out a piece of news still useful for the confirmation: A majority of Donald Trump supporters don’t like black folks. Of course, with context, it gets a bit deeper than that. Not only are diehard Trump groupies less likely to like us (again,…