Politics

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has leveled an odd charge against Barack Obama. He accuses the Illinois senator’s campaign of trying to hijack the Democratic presidential nomination by arguing it has a stronger claim on the nomination because Obama has more pledged delegates than Sen. Hillary Clinton and larger percentage of the popular vote. Wilentz argues…

BARBARA BUSH: Leading ‘awful garbage strikes.’ This was a very interesting time to be living in Washington. The Vietnam War was debated at all the dinner parties, and the whole country worried about racial and student unrest. Here is part of my diary entry from April 5, 1968, to show a little of what it…

It seems like a lifetime ago when some black people were asking if Barack Obama was “black enough” and some white people were insisting that he was “not really black.” Those silly debates seem quaint in retrospect. Back then, people were merely having trouble wrapping their minds around Sen. Obama’s biracial heritage and itinerant upbringing,…

David Swerdlick is an associate editor at The Root. Follow him on Twitter. 

I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination – a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into…

From the blog of Patrick J. Buchanan: Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America. Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands…

In the wake of Barack Obama’s impassioned and eloquent speech on race, forced by his pastor’s hateful rants, the black church, the historic back-bone of the movement for equality of opportunity, has gotten a bad rap. It has been alleged that the fire-breathing oratory — dripping with hate-America themes, bigoted racial messages and all sorts…

This exchange followed a blog post by Rebecca Walker on The Huffington Post. Anonymous: I disagree with your assessment of this election. I think you are really diminishing how much of a threat Hillary is to the male power structure in America. I have never seen the media make the kind of brazen, non-stop sexist…

Five years ago, the United States invaded Iraq and set in motion a chain of events that most Americans wish had never been unleashed. While President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been making the rounds to convince a skeptical public that the war has been critical for America’s national security interests, their words ring…

After Barack Obama’s historic and uplifting call for the nation to “move beyond race,” I had hoped the campaign would return to some of the real issues — the economy, health care, education, and the war. My hopes notwithstanding, race remains an insidious subtext to the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ironically, our civil…