Politics

Black America finds itself in an unusual moment. By any measure, many of our communities are suffering heavily during this economic downturn. Black unemployment is officially at 16.1 percent (some believe the real number hovers around 28 percent, making nearly one-third of black America jobless). Even those who have been fortunate to keep their jobs…

Cornel West’s recent diatribe against President Obama has invited a storm of derision and mockery. And deservedly so. But another aspect of his rant has gone virtually unnoticed: Appparently the good professor thinks of himself as more deserving of a ticket to Obama’s inauguration than a hotel bellhop he’d never met before and about whom…

The Anacostia Community Museum is one of the Smithsonian Institution’s grand, federally chartered Washington, D.C., museums, but it is located miles from the Mall’s gleaming white marble monuments where millions of eighth-grade history students pilgrimage each year. It is a world-class museum charged with interpreting and preserving the black experience. But it is tucked away…

President Obama announced his re-election campaign last month, but first lady Michelle Obama didn’t officially join the 2012 campaign trail until Thursday with a speech at the Democratic National Committee Women’s Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C. She said that this time around, she’s fired up — but admitted to being a reluctant campaigner during the…

For more than 10 years, Richmond, Va.’s oldest municipal burial ground for people of African descent has been covered over by an active parking lot owned by Virginia Commonwealth University. The dead cannot speak, so Richmond’s African-American community has been fighting to remove the parking lot and protect its ancestral legacy. Richmond, former capital of…

During the week of May 22-26, hundreds of Americans are expected to converge in Jackson, Miss., to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. Between May and December of 1961, the nonviolent protest against segregation in the Deep South — which continued despite the Supreme Court’s outlawing of such practices — saw 436 black…

When President Obama takes to the podium Thursday to deliver his vision of the Middle East, he will need all the magic of his oratory. In his two years in office, his message to allies and enemies in the world’s most contentious region has been confusing, at best. His administration has angered both Israelis and…

Don’t judge Dr. Cornel West’s most recent verbal assault on President Barack Obama against the backdrop of his endowed chair at Princeton, his frequent and perplexing appearances on popular talk shows, his Matrix cameo or his quixotic foray into rap. Don’t even judge him as the president’s highest-profile critic among the black intelligentsia — though…

Princeton professor Cornel West is on an anti-Obama tear, and tonight he took it to MSNBC’s The Ed Show. West complained about the president’s record sticking up for the poor and working class, and when asked by the left-wing news show host to explain why he said President Obama has “a certain fear of free…

Michelle Alexander wrote a beautiful piece in the New York Times last weekend. She argued that America has imprisoned far too many people, far too many of them black, and the nation must come to a new moral accounting. We must eliminate excessive sentences for low-level offenses, we must fight the vested interest that millions…