Politics

Last Thursday the nation awoke to the tragic news out of Charleston, S.C., that a white gunman shot and killed nine black parishioners during a weeknight Bible study. The avowed racist deliberately targeted these black Christians, driving over 100 miles from his home to murder the six women and three men who had congregated in…

A white gunman with Confederate plates who liked telling racist jokes in high school and is now telling cops of a desire to trigger a race war kills nine black people at a church that is the living definition of black liberation, but the slayings weren’t about race? Apparently Dylann Roof needed to have written…

Criminal-justice reform must be an election issue for black women in 2016. More than any other group of women in the country, black women are killed, raped and victimized by intimate-partner and community violence. While they are the least protected, as the current McKinney, Texas, episode shows, black women and girls are also beaten, racially profiled and assaulted by police.…

In a recent series of rants against the evil of money in politics, prominent progressive public intellectuals have been experimenting with the new narrative that unregulated high-rolling balls of dark campaign cash are fundamentally racist. That’s obviously a racially charged notion. And given the all-powerful “cash rules everything around me” ethos that’s rapidly transforming American…

More than 70 members of Congress are calling on President Barack Obama to “ban the box” for federal jobs. The “box” in question is one that appears on federal hiring applications, asking job seekers if they have a criminal record. As part of an effort to reduce mass incarceration, many around the country have rallied for…

After a recent shocking report revealing a near doubling in suicide rates for African-American children, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) is calling on President Barack Obama to focus on the issue.  Cleaver is asking the president to create a task force between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Education.  “Suicide is truly a tragedy for…

In the wake of seemingly endless national stories about police brutality, an effort to fund and support police body cameras is making its way through a Republican-controlled Congress. And a Republican senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, is leading the charge.   On Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism held a hearing on…

The results are in: A majority of Americans think the Baltimore unrest was just another mad, black riot. The Pew Research Center surveyed the top five reasons an anxious public considered for the unrest, including anger over Freddie Gray’s death, frustration with police-community relations and the socioeconomic challenges. The poverty narrative didn’t stick, with 61…

Baltimore may be a much calmer city this week than last, but don’t let the placid fog of cleanup and obligatory Loretta Lynch visit fool you. Long stretches of ghetto still remain. The lack of jobs is something Charm City’s leadership has yet to aggressively address (Where’s the campaign on that?). And Maryland’s shattered urban…