Politics

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…

Last June, on assignment covering religion for the Washington Post, I found myself at the National Press Club, where a group of religious leaders were meeting to craft a social justice agenda for the 2008 elections. Among those at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Legislative Conference was a minister named Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man with…

As a journalist, I do not publicly endorse candidates. So, as the black South Africans who had never been allowed to vote in their lives said when the finally could in 1994: My vote is my secret. But as I listened to all the commentary before, and after Sen. Barack Obama’s speech on race, among…

Over the last week, I have been seething about how the media has used de-contextualized clips from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons to hijack the public perception of Sen. Barack Obama’s historic run for the presidency. I was therefore eagerly, if anxiously, awaiting Obama’s formal response to this situation. Since I was en route to the…

In 1975, my parents’ marriage ended. My mother and I moved to Atlanta where Maynard Jackson opened Atlanta as the gateway to the New South. For the first six months, we lived near the intersection of Bankhead Highway and I-285, in what is now called the Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway Corridor – a place made…

It was an amazing speech, a brilliant speech. It was brilliant both in substance and in delivery. He told a convincing, moving story about his own racial history. He was able to paint a truly hopeful, but pragmatic, picture of why people should come together across races. He attempted to explain why he would not…

I am a Hillary Clinton supporter. There, I said it. And I’m tired of the dirty looks I get when I out myself. Why is it so surprising that someone like me – a black, educated, progressive chick – would put my support behind Hillary Clinton? Oh, I know. I’m black, so, of course, I…