Politics

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…