Politics

Is Juan Williams a bigot? Probably not. Should National Public Radio have fired him for his anti-Muslim comments on Fox News? Not this time. No doubt Williams’ bosses at NPR hated it when he was introduced several times each week on Fox News as “NPR’s Juan Williams” — last year they asked him to stop…

By William Saletan Shirley Sherrod, meet Juan Williams. Three months ago, right-wingers clipped a video of Sherrod to make her look like a racist. They circulated the video on the Internet, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture fired her. Now it’s happening again. This time, left-wingers have done the editing. They clipped a video of…

It was well before daybreak a few weeks ago when I got a call from the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes. “White, you need to get over here right away,” Buckwheat insisted. “I’m being stalked.” When I arrived a few minutes later, Buckwheat was hollering into his telephone. “How many times does I have to…

is a former columnist for TIME magazine and a regular contributor to The Root.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Rahm Emanuel was supposed to receive a hero’s welcome in the black community when he announced his candidacy for mayor of Chicago. After all, he was chief of staff for the first black president of the United States, who happened to be the cool former congressman from Illinois! Plus,…

Horseback-riding Teddy Roosevelt might have done a double take were he allowed to gaze from his “Rough Rider” portrait in the White House at the 44th president of the United States, fielding a range of questions about his executive policies from 10 black newspaper columnists sitting around an oblong table. This uniquely nonwhite all-American scene…

Is it conservative to criticize hip-hop? Recently I wrote an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal in which I expressed a feeling of deep disappointment and frustration that Barack Obama would show appreciation — without qualification — for rappers such as Lil Wayne and Jay-Z. I argued that the president can and should listen to…

The NAACP and the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) today fired the second official salvo in the battle between civil rights groups and the Tea Party movement. In a report released this morning, “Tea Party Nationalism,” IREHR researchers Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind detail the origins of the Tea Party and…

Intellectual libertarians and conservatives ignore the reality of their Tea Party shock troops at their peril. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is only the latest conservative unwilling to believe his lying eyes.  Inconveniently for him, the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and the NAACP just released the most comprehensive report to…

If this isn’t a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Ancestry.com has examined President Obama’s family tree and found that he has a common matriarchal ancestor to conservative pundit Sarah Palin named John Smith, a 17th-century pastor in Massachusetts who opposed the persecution of Quakers. Apparently Obama is also a 10th cousin once…