Politics

Nostalgic recollections of The Cosby Show place Cliff Huxtable—Cosby’s duck-walking, sandwich-loving, mugging alter ego—as the smiling patriarch of a well-adjusted nuclear family with two professional incomes in a Brooklyn brownstone barricaded away from the first stirrings of the crack era. It was gently political: “There were no “whitey” call-outs à la George Jefferson, no power-to-the-people…

One of the prerogatives of advanced age is the right to say things that others can’t or won’t. For many people of advanced age, the decision to speak truth becomes non-negotiable, and elision is replaced by a determined and consistent effort to tell it like it is. This can explain the inappropriate uncle at Thanksgiving…

The furor over former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s remarks that “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man” reminds me of a scene from John Singleton’s 1997 film, Rosewood, which dramatized the real-life lynching and burning of a rural, predominantly…

The latest from CNN: Raymond Clark was apprehended about 8:10 a.m. ET at a Super 8 motel in Cromwell, Connecticut, where he had spent the night after being released Wednesday following his submission to DNA testing. Bond for Clark has been set at $3 million, New Haven Police Chief James Lewis said. Lewis described the…

Jimmy Carter is a son of the South. Not the New South of relocated corporate headquarters and (foreclosed) McMansions, but Jim Crow’s South. So we’ll all have to excuse his refusal to act like he doesn’t hear Glenn Beck’s vicious dog whistle. He knows too well the coded language of political racism because he witnessed…

The important thing about former President Jimmy Carter’s declaration that the blowback against President Barack Obama has to do with the fact that “he’s a black man” is not how true it is, but how sad it is. Black people have been saying this all along, but when an old Southern governor who understands the…

Never mind Joe Wilson and the tea baggers. You know who really ought to be breaking congressional decorum and marching on Washington about health care? Black people. We ought to be so angry about the disastrous health care system that we disrupt society at every level until it gets fixed. Why? Well, don’t expect our…

What does it take to convince federal watchdogs that mortgage bankers can’t be trusted to make housing loans without discriminating by race and ethnicity? If they need proof beyond all the obvious observational and circumstantial evidence available to the rest of us, then they should pay attention to a study being released today that was…

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration had increased funding for the Civil Rights Division, encouraged stricter enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and removed the Bush-era practices of putting important decisions in the hands of political appointees rather than career lawyers. Unfortunately, current and former Justice Department employees say much of…

When an outraged Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush during a visit to Baghdad, the incident was fodder for jokes and snickers. Mostly we laughed at the president’s lightning-quick reaction and the failure of the Secret Service to stop the guy from throwing not one, but two shoes. But even those…