Politics

This has been a decade of racial progress and setbacks. From the curb, it may be hard to tell the difference. So as a public service, I give you…. 2000-2010: A Race Odyssey: • After the tragedy of 9/11, Arab American stereotypes morph from harmless convenient store owner to new American nigger. The Simpsons’ Apuh…

Nine years ago, on September 11th, 2001, a well-coordinated team of 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who had infiltrated the United States months before highjacked four airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand people. On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to detonate an explosive…

If the 21st century’s opening decade has revealed anything about American life, it’s this: We’re a nation that’s much better at breaking things than fixing them. We opened the epoch by thrashing about the globe, looking for something to smash in reaction to 9/11. We’ve closed it by wallowing in the inevitable wreckage of our…

SAY NO TO NO ON DRUGS? Will common sense about the war on drugs emerge from Mexico? For several years, the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderón has battled the illegal traffic in drugs with a strategy defined and supported by the United States. He has deployed large numbers of troops in Ciudad Juarez, a…

On Christmas Day, a clatter, a puff of smoke and a brief, terrifying flame: Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, had allegedly tried to blow up his airplane. Others aboard the airliner quickly subdued the man, a former University College of London student who…

Merry Christmas, Mr. President President Barack Obama’s Christmas present was the health care reform bill the U.S. Senate passed strictly along party lines in the early hours of Christmas Eve. The 60-40 vote along party lines, including the Senate’s two independents, signaled how dead the concept of bipartisanship has become. The great task now is…

The imminent passage of health care in the Senate comes at the same time that black Americans in Congress and elsewhere have expressed disappointment that President Obama has not been addressing the needs of communities of color. Black neighborhoods have been hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis and the ongoing job and credit crunch.…

Where I grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, one of the most violent neighborhoods in New York, there was an alley alongside the building where my family lived. The alley was a semi-public place: I played in that alley; guys and girls snuck moments to feel each other up in that…

A Black Politician Rises In France The most popular politician in French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government is Rama Yade, the minister of sports, according to the latest survey. She is also the most visible black politician in a country where few minorities play prominent roles outside of sports and entertainment. Yade, 32, a native of…

No sooner had I left my U.S. home and all its fractious politics that I ran into the same scenario thousands of miles away in my other home, South Africa. I came back to brutal opposition politics and a bubbling cauldron of dissent within the ruling party not unlike America’s Blue Dog Democrats. In South Africa, the ruling…