Politics

When President Obama released his long-form birth certificate in response to the tirades of the lunatic fringe “Birthers,” you could almost hear the groans of blacks all over America. We understood the president’s desire to quell the distraction drummed up by the Birthers, whose thinly veiled appeal to tropes of racial “otherness” had become the…

In Mississippi, Wanda Parker’s son was suspended from school after being caught with an iPod Touch, which, she says, administrators mistook for a cellphone. She unsuccessfully pleaded for weeks to get her son admitted back into school. But because of the school district’s zero-tolerance cellphone policy, Parker’s son, who is African American, missed seven weeks…

Maggie Michael of the Associated Press is reporting that dozens of “instigators of chaos” have been arrested after deadly clashes between angry Christians, Muslims and security forces that left 24 dead and at least 200 wounded, Egypt’s official news agency reported on Monday. Sunday’s clashes, sparked by a recent attack on a church in southern…

When he was a 13-year-old braving northern-Midwest winters, Eyob “Joe” Mamo couldn’t have imagined that he would someday control a mini-empire of gas stations on the East Coast. In 1981 Mamo’s father, Yenberber Mamo, who owned the Mamo Kacha bus company in Addis Ababa, sent Joe to a North Dakota boarding school to protect him…

When the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 46.2 million Americans were now living in poverty, it wasn’t a stretch to guess which group of Americans topped the list: African Americans. This was no surprise, given the black unemployment rate of 16.7 percent, nearly double the 9 percent national rate. The Pew Research Center recently noted…

The Associated Press is reporting that GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain campaigned in the battleground state of Virginia before a crowd of about 1,000 Christian conservatives. Speaking at the annual Family Foundation fundraising gala, he appealed to the crowd by attacking the Obama administration for failing to improve the economy to help parents provide for…

In her Chicago Sun-Times column, Mary Mitchell says that Michelle Obama is sure to help draw national attention to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s food-desert campaign. She will join him on Oct. 25 when he presides over a food-access summit. Emanuel, a master strategist, has found a way to link his own pet project to first…

Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School You would always get straight talk from professor Derrick Bell. When I was a young lawyer, barely six years out of law school, I was at a crossroads. I could stay in the U.S. Department of Justice and take a position in the criminal section…