Politics

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is in Los Angeles for the 102nd NAACP Annual Convention. She chatted with The Root about the first black president, what everyone can do to get involved and why she’s afraid Jim Crow might be making a comeback. The Root: Does having a black president help or hinder progress on the…

The political gamesmanship continues in the debt-ceiling debate between congressional Democrats and Republicans, with a deadline looming after which our nation goes into default on its debts. In a bid to push past the deadlock and calm jittery financial markets, the president took his case to the nation (once again) in a prime-time speech tonight…

Amid a cloud of uncertainty over reaching a debt-ceiling deal, President Barack Obama met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the Oval Office late Sunday, according to the Hill. Only Democratic leaders were invited to the 6 p.m. meeting, according to the Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.…

In a revealing interview in the New York Times Magazine, Cornel West unloads some of his angst and anger about President Obama. He was interviewed for the magazine by Andrew Goldman. So let me ask you: in 2007, you introduced Barack Obama as your “brother, companion and comrade.” But in May, you referred to him…

The Huffington Post is reporting that a meeting between the president and leaders of Congress over the spiraling debt ceiling ended with an agreement that it is “urgent to find a path forward this weekend.” “Staffers were set to work through the weekend, in hopes of crafting a compromise that could avert the United States…

After a four-month investigation conducted by 13 law-enforcement agencies, Arroyo Grande, Calif., police on Friday charged four white transients with a March cross burning. The cross burning, only yards from the bedroom window of a home shared by a mixed-race teen and her Latina mother, shocked this bucolic, Central Coast tourist mecca. The cross burning…

While we wait for the arrival of that miracle worker whom my colleague David Swerdlick calls the black Ronald Reagan, it’s worth asking, WWGD? What Would the Gipper Do to resolve the extraordinary crisis over the federal budget and the national debt ceiling if, by some miracle, he had been resurrected and were still our…

Deep down inside, many of us always believed that despite all the drama and posturing, America’s leaders would work out a way to keep our nation from going into default. Surely they would work out something … right? This evening, when U.S. House Speaker John Boehner walked out on negotiations to extend the country’s debt…

Corporations, like all human organizations, develop distinct cultures. A set of shared values evolves that controls what a company is willing to do in the pursuit of profit — and most important, what it is not. Most often, those values are driven by senior management. To succeed in that environment, employees must conform to the…

The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial is set to open next month on the National Mall in Washington, after years of delay and controversy. It’s about time. But the approaching dedication has me thinking about another African American who campaigned just as hard as Dr. King for equal rights and doesn’t have a statue on…