Politics

Hey, uh, we didn’t get our 40 acres and a mule But we did get you, CC, heh, yeah —From the song “Chocolate City” (1975) by Parliament Two local disc jockeys first anointed Washington, D.C., “Chocolate City” in the early 1970s. White flight to the suburbs after the 1968 riots had left the nation’s capital…

I presume we all agree that Newt Gingrich’s latest charge against our president is so absurd that it doesn’t even deserve comment. Obama has a “Kenyan” worldview he drank in from his father when his father barely even knew him? The statement is based on stunning ignorance about the basics of Obama’s biography, and willful…

As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Barbara Lee, who represents northern California’s 9th District, leads one of the nation’s most prominent African-American instruments for social change. On Monday she released a memo in which she encouraged America and the media to revamp how they discuss race and racism, and called the phrase “national…

President Barack Obama can add children’s-book author to his growing list of credentials. Obama has penned Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, an illustrated children’s book that will be released Nov. 16. The publication completes a three-book, $1.9 million deal Obama signed with Random House while he was still an Illinois senator, including…

Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian M. Fenty are sometimes mistaken for each other: Both of them have similarly shaven bald heads and are grouped among the new breed of black political leadership. Unlike their predecessors, who rode a wave out of the civil rights movement and into mayoralties of major…

Don’t blame preacher Terry Jones for the last week’s Quran burning debacle. He was the crackpot in that drama — he was just doing his job. Blame former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for Muslim-baiting by stoking the public’s fears about “creeping sharia.” Blame Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf for waiting a month too long to defend…

The Root’s Best Picks of the CBC’s 40th Annual Legislative Weekend in Washington, D.C.: *The Root is a co-sponsor of “Shut Out: Evaluating Madison Avenue for Disparity in Advertising Media and Creative Services”

Just when you thought the false propaganda against Barack Obama couldn’t get any deeper, along comes Newt Gingrich with another trainload of lies. Setting a shameful new standard for cynical manipulation of the paranoid fears of the Tea Party and  so-called Birthers, the Republican former speaker of the House now claims that Obama suffers from…

There’s Washington. And there’s D.C., the District of Columbia, a city long fractured by race, class and its very geography. A park and a river act as natural fault lines between blacks and whites and low-income and wealthy residents. Those divisions and congressional oversight of the city’s legislation and budget have framed the African-American political…