Politics

As they say in the Budweiser commercial, “Here we go!” The Shirley Sherrod incident provided one of the most fertile and significant opportunities to focus attention on the toxic racism of the far right, the dynamics of race and class in the rural South, the cynical use of the “reverse racism” charge to ignite opposition…

Those who attempt to paint the president’s appearance on The View this Thursday as a reaction to the Shirley Sherrod situation or as a political triumph miss the point. President Barack Obama did not appear on the ABC midmorning show because he was on the defense after the Sherrod-Breitbart bungle. He was going on the…

President Barack Obama opened up to the ladies of The View about race and pop culture. He said that the controversy over Shirley Sherrod’s firing was made up by the media, and his office overreacted by firing her. President Obama admitted that the drama surrounding the Sherrod incident proves that racial tensions still exist in…

In his address to the National Urban League’s Centennial Conference in Washington, D.C., this morning, President Barack Obama laid out the future of America’s embroiled educational plan while also chastising some of the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Prefacing the meat of his speech by saying, ”I was elected not just to do…

Shirley Sherrod says she will file a lawsuit against conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart for posting a video that wrongly portrayed her as racist. The former U.S. Agriculture employee told a packed session at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in San Diego that she would “definitely” take legal action against Breitbart.…

It is very dangerous for an administration to follow too closely to the advice, or marching orders, of ideologues on the right or the left. There is also great danger in responding too quickly to what might be no more than willful lying passed off as fact on a network like Fox News, which takes…

A disturbing magazine cover recently crossed my desk, announcing in big, bold print that Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the NRA will be hosting a “Restoring Honor” rally in August. It’s being held at the Lincoln Memorial, a place that honors America’s most revered president — the one who saved our union, freed African slaves…

Once upon a time, the ultimate concentration of black political power in Brooklyn lay in Weeksville, a strategically planned village of free black property holders that began in 1838 in what is now Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Weeksville was created to be a political base,” says Jennifer Scott, director of research at the Weeksville Heritage Center. The settlement…

President Obama’s strong support in the Hispanic community may be waning. The Nielsen Company and Stanford University sponsored a survey that shows that President Obama gets “lukewarm ratings” on issues important to Hispanics, which could have a negative impact on his party and him. For a group that supported Obama so heavily in 2008 and…

Here is what I anticipate: Jim Webb, the senior senator from Virginia, will soon be both vilified and lionized in the ”media” for attacking affirmative action as wrong-headed and divisive. And one result is that the intense conversation we’ve endured in recent days about race in the wake of the sacking of Agriculture Department employee…