Politics

Senator Obama is mistaken. The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who is the Obama family’s pastor and the subject of recent fierce attacks in the media, is not, as Obama has stated, that “he has a lot of the…baggage of those times,” (those times being the 1960s). The problem is also not,…

Note to Geraldine Ferraro, Gloria Steinem, and complainer in chief, Hillary Clinton: Get over yourselves. Your cries of reverse racism, your complaints about overt sexism in the campaign, your vocal protests about media favoritism being shown BarackObama, ring hollow. We are not feeling your pain. None of you are symbolic of female oppression. You are…

A black orator stood before a rapt audience, his voice rising to a crescendo as he made this fiery statement: “Statesmen of America beware what you do! The soil is in readiness, and the seed-time has come. Nations, not less than individuals, reap as they sow. The dreadful calamities of the past few years came…

Several weeks ago we were presented with the surreal specter of two iconic figures from the civil rights movement battling each other in the name of “democracy.” Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, wrote a letter in early February to the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) demanding that the delegates “elected” by…

There’s a black writer whose work I follow who is interested in prisoner re-entry programs, supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, voted for George Bush in neither election and writes of Black English as coherent speech. That writer is, as it happens, me. Recently on The Root there was a…

Like all New Yorkers, I am deeply saddened by this week’s events. But out of the ashes of this firestorm comes renewed hope. When David Paterson is sworn in next Monday, he will become the first African-American governor in New York State’s history. His ascension to the office marks the latest in a growing and…

The first thing to know about me is that I am a lifelong Democrat. I have voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1976, when I was first eligible to do so. Furthermore, in 1984, I was a new assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and on Oct. 12th of that year, I…

America is being introduced to David Paterson, who will be sworn in as governor of New York on Monday in the wake of Eliot Spitzer’s resignation, as the first African American to hold that office in New York and the first blind governor in the nation’s history. I know him as my childhood friend from…

When a self-righteous crusader like Eliot Spitzer is caught with his pants down, a lot of onlookers might feel a tinge of glee to see such hypocrisy revealed. But the law under which he may be prosecuted, the Mann Act, is a relic that should give pause to anyone looking to hold Spitzer accountable in…

On my first night in Monrovia the rain pounds so hard on the tin roof of the house where I am staying, the sound is able to snatch me from a deep and jetlagged sleep. There is no rain like the rain in Liberia and I have heard it before, but this is February, the…