Politics

Alexandre Dumas played by a white actor? That’s the controversial role the ubiquitous French actor Gerard Depardieu has taken on in a new film called The Other Dumas. Dumas, author of such famous novels as “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers,” was the grandson of a freed Haitian slave and a French…

This afternoon the NAACP elected its youngest board chair in history: health care advocacy professional Roslyn Brock. Though only 44 years old, the native Floridian is already a 25-year veteran of the civil rights organization. Most recently NAACP vice chair, Brock is a protégé of the outgoing chairman, civil rights legend Julian Bond. Bond is…

Last February, I was heading out to Los Angeles to be a part of the annual State of the Black Union event that featured some of the greatest members of our generation of black Americans. From the conversations around dinner tables to the panels to the fundraiser concert by Prince and Sheila E., it was…

Crystal Feimster went to college thinking she was going to be an attorney. The legal profession’s loss was history’s gain. While she was still an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Feimster met a string of distinguished African-American historians who made history exciting, including Tera Hunter, Darlene Clark Hine and Clayborne Carson. “It’s one…

The office of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson lies halfway between Congress and the White House. The placement is appropriate; the 48-year-old New Orleans native—the first African American to run the agency tasked with protecting the air, water and health of Americans—walks a line between action and negotiation every day. She keeps a copy…

It’s Hard Out Here for a Black Politician First, there was the exposé by the New York Times of the Congressional Black Caucus’ profligate ways, spending more on catering than on the scholarships it gives out to black college students. The story has not provoked the outrage you might expect.Maybe folks are in the don’t-air-our-dirty-linen…

Being a U.S. senator is arguably the best political job in the country. It has most of the prestige and almost none of the accountability of being president of the United States. But Sen. Evan Bayh—age 54, with solid poll numbers and a helmet of hair straight out of central casting—is stepping down from his…

Who Works? In 2008, employment among the major race and ethnicity groups, with the exception of Asians, was lower than a year earlier. The employment-population ratios (the proportion of the population that is employed): Blacks: 57.3 percent. This pattern of a relatively low employment-population ratio for blacks has persisted for decades. Asians: 64.3 percent. Hispanics:…