Politics

With the Obama administration’s hard-fought passage of financial reform, Americans are waiting with bated breath and open wallets to see if their windfall is on the horizon. While people of all races have struggled in the past few years, black Americans have been disproportionately affected by the recent economic collapse, and many are eager to…

Now that the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted along party lines to confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court (and full approval by the Democratic-controlled Senate seems like a shoo-in), a new chapter in the court’s history will begin. Kagan will join a court whose conservative majority has aggressively…

This firing of USDA official Shirley Sherrod has more drama than an episode of As the World Turns. Sherrod resigned after a tape surfaced that seemed to show her for making racist remarks about withholding help from a white farmer. Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted the clip and Fox News ran it. Sherrod insisted that…

I feel bad for Shirley Sherrod. Not just because she lost her job. Not just because it may be that she did not do what she is accused of doing. Not because her only crime may be the very postmodern transgression of being on video and out of context. (Hear her remarks in context here.)…

President Barack Obama called out Republicans today for blocking much-needed unemployment benefits for the millions of Americans out of work. The emergency relief extension has been blocked three times by Senate Republicans, who insist that extending the benefits will keep unemployed Americans from looking for jobs. Come again? The president and other Democrats also pointed…

On ABC’s This Week, Vice President Joe Biden stated that he does not think the ultra-conservative Tea Party is racist. Taking a page from the Whoopi Goldberg-Mel Gibson debacle, he stated, “I wouldn’t characterize the Tea Party as racist,” but “there are individuals who are either members of or on the periphery of some of…

In his first campaign appearance, South Carolina’s surprising U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene made his first public speech, in which he tackled education, jobs and justice. He started off with a joke and moved into those issues quite quickly, rattling off statistics. In the 6 1/2-minute speech given at the local NAACP’s monthly meeting, Greene…

Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams and his organization have been kicked to the curb by the National Tea Party Federation, the loose coalition of organizations around the conservative movement. The federation says it ousted Williams’ group, a Sacramento, Calif.-based political action committee, because it refused to rebuke him for his comments about the NAACP.…

Since January of last year, worries about the ballooning deficit and the Obama administration’s spending excesses have been driving the polls and the political debate. The only thing that seems likely to prevent massive conservative victories in this year’s midterm elections would be missteps by key leaders within the movement. Over the last week, we…

It’s common knowledge that, for myriad historical reasons, America’s black-white wealth gap is atrocious. In 2007 white households had 15 times the total wealth of African-American households. And this year a study showed that median wealth for a single black woman is just $100; for a single white woman, that sum jumps to $41,000. Exacerbating…