Politics
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The Price of Choosing Jails Over Schools
As federal, state and local governments across the nation slash their budgets to close looming shortfalls, there is one clear winner in the budget battles: correctional systems, which cost the nation nearly $70 billion annually. During the last two decades, funding for prisons eclipsed spending for higher education sixfold. The NAACP is looking to reverse…
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RightWatch: I Will Miss Glenn Beck
During the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation is said to have subsidized the Communist Party so that agents could keep track of its activities. Without a centralized organization luring Marxist sympathizers like moths to a flame, they might have scattered in all directions, making it more difficult for G-men to monitor…
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How to Talk About AIDS in Church
The NAACP has undertaken a two-year initiative to combat the spread of AIDS in the black community, and the organization is committed to getting faith leaders to address the issue despite religious and cultural taboos that can make doing so difficult. “We need to acknowledge that, in America, health is a true civil right. It…
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Does Sharpton Have the White House on Speed Dial?
If you had any doubt at all about the political clout the Rev. Al Sharpton has accrued since the start of the Obama administration, seeing the political heavyweights who showed up and spoke at the 20th-anniversary convention of his National Action Network (April 6-9) should put those doubts to rest. President Barack Obama himself made…
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Your Take: How the Racial Wealth Gap Hurts Children of Color
A white acquaintance who grew up wealthy in the South in the 1940s had the family gardener’s son, an African-American boy, as his earliest best friend. He remembers vividly what happened when he asked his mother if his friend could join them for lunch. She put the black child at a table in the kitchen…
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We Can't Afford Not to Fix Our Justice System
Reforming the nation’s criminal-justice system is one of the most urgent civil rights issues of our time. One shocking fact illustrates why: More African-American men are entangled in the criminal-justice system today than were enslaved in 1850. How did we get here? The rise in America’s penchant for punishment can be traced as far back…
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Tea Party Turns on House Speaker Boehner
Fresh from our “Between a rock and a hard place” file, CNN is reporting that Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips wrote on the organization’s website, “The Tea Party movement should find a candidate to run against House Speaker John Boehner in 2012 and should set as a goal, to defeat in a primary, the…
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Your Take: Race-Baiting Is Different From Racism
When more than 43,000 ColorOfChange.org members spoke up last week to demand that huckster Andrew Breitbart not be given a place of privilege on the Huffington Post, they weren’t motivated by some desire to name-call. They weren’t pretending to have some window into Breitbart’s heart, or to understand his personal preferences or how he treats…
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President Obama: We Don't Have Time for Games
Talking Points Memo is reporting that President Obama expressed his frustration with congressional Republicans on their failure so far to reach a budget compromise that would avert a government shutdown by the end of the week, instructing them to start acting like “grown-ups” and to stop playing political games. “We don’t have time for games,”…