Politics
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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,…
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3 Years Later, the Ghosts of Shelby Still Haunt Us
Three years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a crushing ruling in the landmark case Shelby v. Holder (pdf). For reasons still mostly unclear to me (Chief Justice John Roberts partially opined that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act were “extraordinary measures” no longer needed because America’s legacy on race “had changed”), Section 5 of the…
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Election 2016: Do Black Lives Matter to 3rd-Party Options?
On June 22, I attended CNN’s Libertarian Party town hall featuring Govs. Gary Johnson and Bell Weld. I was hesitant to attend because I am exhausted by this election. Chatter that privileges certain voices, monetizes certain platforms and disparages those who can recognize the bulls—t is the white noise that my black ears refuse. Black…
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Explainer: How a Racist, Anti-Immigrant Campaign Caused ‘Brexit’
The last 72 hours have been a whirlwind of news in the United States—Supreme Court rulings, the Freddie Gray case and the Democrats’ House of Representatives sit-in for starters. Across the pond, however, there was a vote that not only is horribly instructive for what could happen in America this fall but, worse, could also…
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‘Enough Is Enough’: House Dems Stage Sit-in on Floor of Congress Over Guns
At noon Wednesday, members of the House shut it down—all the way down. In a historic act of protest, Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives refused to observe the regular order of the House, staging a sit-in protest over the lack of legislation on gun control. The protest Wednesday occurred after House Republicans…