The Body Cam Trade-Off
Challenging police violence shouldn’t require black Americans to sacrifice their privacy. Read my piece on this topic at Jacobin.
Blacked Out: Black Marginality and American Politics
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for two cases that could have major ramifications for black and brown Americans. One, Fisher vs. University of Texas, is a more-or-less standard “affirmative action is reverse racism” case that could potentially bar or severely restrict colleges and universities from considering race in the application process. The…
Cops just shot my cousin dead: Here’s why talking about it is quietly destructive
My cousin Charles, an unarmed black man, was recently shot and killed by an off-duty police officer. Read my piece about it on Salon here.
Voting is Not Enough: An Analysis of “True South” and Black American Electoral Politics
Ben Jealous and The Center for American Progress recently released True South: Unleashing Democracy in the Black Belt 50 Years After Freedom Summer,a report on politics in the Black Belt. True South demonstrates that an effective voter registration drive in the South could shift the balance of power in some states from Republican to Democrat.…
The Media’s Silence on Institutional Racism
Racially charged controversies have dominated mainstream media for the last two weeks. First was the Paula Deen fiasco in which the cooking show host has been exposed as being a good ol’ fashioned racist. I don’t know exactly when that story broke because I don’t really care about it (I’ll explain why later in this…
Welcome to the Promised Land: Obama, the Voting Rights Act, and the Death of Racial Justice in America
Yesterday, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Back in the day, before racism was over, certain states and municipalities adopted various strategies which prevented blacks from voting. The Voting Rights Act sought to rectify that by first establishing a formula to determine if a given jurisdiction had discriminated…
Kimani Gray and the (New?) Black Left
I’m postponing the last of my Africa-trip-inspired blog posts to weigh in on the Kimani Gray killing and the “unrest” that has followed in the days since. I expected my first time hearing about Kimani Gray to also be my last. According to police reports, two plain-clothes police officers approached Kimani after he broke off…
A Lesson in the New Racism: Dismantling Affirmative Action (Part 2)
“Although some African Americans are doing very well—enrolling in universities and graduate schools at record rates thanks to affirmative action—as a group, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated… Nearly one-fourth of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same as in 1968.…
Power for Trayvon
“If there had been no nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree, there would have been no Jena 6… It was this evidence of old-fashioned racism that made it possible for a new generation of protestors to frame the attempted murder charges against six black teens in a manner that mainstream America would understand as racist……
The Black President
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want…
ReignFall 