Politics

The old saying holds that in politics you don’t have to win, you just have to not lose. But what the saying doesn’t tell you is that sometimes what looks like victory is actually a step backward. And that will be the case for black folk should Hillary Clinton win the Democratic Party nomination and…

Oprah Winfrey has been widely criticized by white feminists who saw her decision to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton as a betrayal that put race before gender. Oprah’s pointed response spoke for many black women whose loyalty to gender and race is also being questioned — and tested. “You know, after Iowa, there were…

In a recent article on Sen. Ted Kennedy’s powerful endorsement of Barack Obama, New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests that Baby Boomers who developed their political identities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who have hardened over decades of political conflict, are intrinsically devoid of hope. Instead, the Camelot mystique of the…

After much prompting by women, the national media, and the African American community, I, speaking on behalf of “my own,” am now comfortable in declaring the candidate I support to be the 44th president of the United States. As I am frequently reminded, I am black and I am a woman. And, given African Americans’…

From the beginning of his presidential campaign, which unofficially began with the release of his second book The Audacity of Hope, Senator Barack Obama has been positioned as an underdog against the Clinton machine. Now, with polls showing him in a virtual dead heat with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the media has constructed his early success…

“Do you live in the good ‘hood or the bad ‘hood?” The question came by email. A friend who lives in my native North Carolina was reading a New York Times article about Shaker Heights, Ohio, where I live. She wanted to know if I was safe. The Times story recounted the brutal, New Year’s…