Politics

Saying that Barack Obama’s election marked a “historic step in the effort towards equality in the United States,” California lawmakers last week passed a bill to encourage schools to teach students about the racial significance of his presidency, the Associated Press reports. The California Assembly, with unanimous bipartisan support, passed the measure Thursday. It now…

Attorney General Eric Holder—one of President Barack Obama’s closest advisers—plans to remain in office through November’s midterm elections, a Justice Department official told Reuters. Beyond the elections, the official could not confirm any plans that Holder, 63, might have, the news site reports. Holder has been attorney general since shortly after President Obama took office…

After an uproar by students and parents in Topeka, Kan., over seating arrangements, Michelle Obama will now address a high school graduation class a day earlier, according to the Associated Press. As The Root reported last week, the Topeka Public School District had invited the first lady to speak May 17 at a combined ceremony…

On Thursday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus forcefully denounced Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s controversial comments about slavery. In a statement to CNN, Priebus said, “Bundy’s comments are completely beyond the pale. Both highly offensive and 100 percent wrong on race.” Bundy, who in recent weeks has become a hero on the political right for…

Nowadays, we get treated to someone’s half-baked revisionist take on slavery so regularly that it’s hard to get worked up anymore when, let’s say, Arizona Republican congressional candidate Jim Brown writes on his Facebook page that “Basically slave owners took pretty good care of their slaves,” or when potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson…

Above the Law’s Elie Mystal doesn’t think that affirmative action supporters need to hyperventilate over Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action—which upheld Michigan’s ban on race-conscious admissions policies at state colleges—because, he writes, the justices, in fact, “didn’t rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional.” And indeed, they didn’t—not this…

Some of America’s leading public intellectuals, scholars and activists gathered at Tufts University April 16-18 for the fifth annual Barack Obama and American Democracy conference.   Michael Eric Dyson’s exhilarating opening keynote offered a rich intellectual and political framework for principled criticism of the Obama administration’s political and moral failures with a balanced appreciation of…