Politics

Holding that Line: Goldman executives tight-lippedhttp://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/27/1600918/under-heated-questioning-goldman.html What did you expect? We don’t even know why they’re having hearings. Why ask liars, thieves and scoundrels who made billions while tanking the U.S. economy to tell the truth? Sure, the Goldman execs are the beacons of truth, which is how we got into this dire economic situation…

In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place. With intellectual honesty as his intent, Henry Louis Gates Jr. set off a bomb in the black wing of “victim studies”…

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s op-ed in the New York Times, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” (April 22, 2010), is a provocative piece whose core argument is the following: Because African elites were involved in the transatlantic slave trade as commercial partners with Europeans, blame is necessarily and equally assigned to them as well, spreading guilt…

President Obama will deliver the eulogy at the funeral of Dorothy Height, the civil rights leader who died last week at the age of 98. Height, who was president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, was one of the last surviving leaders of the generation that battled for the fundamental rights of African…

Henry Louis Gates Jr.—whom I once admiringly described as a blend of W.E.B. Du Bois and P.T. Barnum—has a genius for stirring up controversy, even when he doesn’t mean to. It was Gates, the editor-in-chief of The Root, who last year provoked the most embarrassing racial moment of Barack Obama’s young presidency by managing to…

Sometimes a smart take on a well-worn issue brings a fresh perspective. Writer Tim Wise accomplished that with  this article: Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead…

Police misconduct has been back in the news lately. Two incidents in particular may encourage the Obama administration’s Justice Department to take a more aggressive and comprehensive stance against police brutality and systematic coverups of police misconduct. Parents, college administrators and residents across the state of Maryland have been up in arms since videotape surfaced…

While Michael Steele’s latest remarks have Republicans in their usual state of turmoil, Alternet’s Rich Benjamin points out that the party, without a single black member in Congress, is offering up a heaping plate of soul for this year’s midterm elections. In remarks at DePaul University this week, Michael Steele, the Republican leader, declared that…

Roughly one year after nominating Justice Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama will soon get another opportunity to name another justice to the highest court in the land. Unlike last year’s relatively smooth selection of the first Latina, this year’s nomination promises to become a protracted battle that will shine a light not just on the…

The funeral for Dorothy I. Height, a torchbearer of the civil rights movement, will be held at 10 a.m. on April 29 at the Washington National Cathedral, according to former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, who is overseeing the arrangements. The service for Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro…