Politics

Recently the Schott Foundation released a bleak report on the state of black male education. Only eight states graduate more than 70 percent of black non-Hispanic males from their high schools. Four states have a graduation rate between 60 percent and 69 percent. Twenty states (plus Washington D.C.) have graduation rates below 50 percent. Nationwide,…

Lawrence Ross is the author of the Los Angeles Times best-seller The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities. His newest book, Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses, is a blunt and frank look at the historical and contemporary issue of campus racism on predominantly white college…

by Jonathan Capeheart Beware members of Congress in safe districts. More often than not, they end up wrapping themselves in the corrupting cloak of entitlement. My favorite, as you probably know, is Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.). If you didn’t, just click here to get the quick debrief. But the gold in gall might have to…

The ire that black farmers and their advocates are currently feeling has two targets: the Senate’s failure to vote the money to complete the farmers’ settlement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and President Obama’s recent generous offer to white Arkansas farmers. Both examples of political expediency are bitter reminders of black farmers’ second-class status.…

Analyzing the relative dearth of monetary aid to the victims of recent flooding in Pakistan, experts theorized that Americans were being tight with donations partly because the crisis was so distant — both literally and culturally. It’s a fact of life that if people can’t empathize with a problem on a very visceral level, it’s…

President Obama’s Oval Office speech earlier this week should have felt like a win for the administration. The official transfer of power that came hours later in Iraq should have been the “victory lap” the president desperately needs from a political standpoint. Instead, many critics of the White House saw the speech and subsequent ceremony…

The outcomes of wars are intimately connected to the decisions about whether to fight them in the fist place. And the Bush administration’s determination in 2003 to march into Baghdad was based on costly hallucinations. The goals of the invasion were to destroy the Iraqi army, destroy the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, rid Iraq…