Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Newark Mayor Cory Booker is a rock solid Democrat and a President Obama backer. But he inadvertently and almost certainly unintentionally raised a campaign problem for Obama. The problem is the danger to Obama of what many perceive as going negative in his campaign salvos at presumptive GOP presidential contender...

The latest census report confirms what has been an unstoppable trend for the past two decades. That America is well on the way to becoming a majority non-white nation. With fewer white babies being born than Latino, black and Asian babies, that may come a lot sooner than...

The word from GOP insiders close to presumptive GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is that he will pick "a boring white guy" as his vice presidential running mate. That's true for one obvious reason and another even more fundamental reason about the vice presidency. The obvious is Sarah...

The vote on the gay marriage ban in North Carolina's Halifax County drew some national ink. The county in the northeast part of the state is mostly rural and the majority black. It backed the state's anti-gay marriage initiative by a whopping two to one majority. The anti-gay marriage vote...

It was never whether, but when President Obama would say yes to gay marriage. The tipoff that he'd back gay marriage came long before Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yes to gay marriage. It came before legions of top Democrats said yes to gay...

A hanging effigy that looked suspiciously like President Obama on a flatbed truck in New York City and the sign on the Peach Oyster Bar in Unincorporated Draketown, Georgia "I do not support the N..... in the White House" normally could be written off as the by-now pro-forma...

The scramble to dig up any piece of salacious dirt, gossip, or innuendo about President Obama before he was President Obama is never ending. The latest in the long train of purported tell-all exposes on Obama is no different. Due out in June, Barack Obama: The Story is a story,...

House Majority leader John Boehner's "green light" to the GOP controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to consider a contempt of Congress citation against Attorney General Eric Holder is just the latest in the continuing dance of political gamesmanship the GOP is playing with President Obama. That's right Obama....

Accused murderer of Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman almost certainly will eventually face a jury. And what if that jury is all white? A recent Duke University study showed that all white juries in Florida were more likely to convict a black defendant than mixed ethnic juries. Though Zimmerman isn't black,...

As president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, social commentator, and longtime critic of many of the Los Angeles Police Department's racial practices, the invitation I got three years ago was unprecedented. Then Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton called and asked me to be his special guest at...

Guitar-strumming iconoclastic Ted Nugent got an obligatory visit from and interview by the Secret Service for his loose-lipped crack that to ensure that President Obama's not be re-elected, "we need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November" at the National Rifle Association convention....

For two fateful days at the end of April and the first day of May 1992, I ducked around police cordons and barricades, and cringed in fear at the cackle of police gunfire. I choked, and gagged on and was blinded by the thick, acrid smoke that at times blotted...

What do Kendrick Meek, Alvin Greene, Mike Thurmond, and C. Anthony Muse have in common? They are black, male, and all four had hoped to join one of the world's most elite, select and politically powerful bodies in the world, the U.S. Senate. They didn't make it. Meek, Greene, and...

There was never much doubt that if the Supreme Court ever got a chance to decide the constitutionality of the health care reform law that it would be in for rough sledding from the court's five conservatives. The half week of court questioning on the law more than bore out...

President Obama has been called on the carpet yet again by some gay activists for not forcefully and unequivocally saying "I support gay marriage." This doesn't mean simply his backing full equality, civil rights, and civil unions for gays, or support for gays in the military, calls on UN to...

The figures are well known. More whites are on welfare, use food stamps, and public health services numerically than blacks and Latinos. More whites rely on social security, Medicare, and farm supports statistically and proportionally than blacks or Latinos. In Mississippi and Alabama the poverty and unemployment rate...

The latest grim figures for black joblessness wiped away the brief glimmer of hope that the nation's tepid and cautious recovery might finally be diminishing the chronically high unemployment levels among blacks and the Great Depression-level jobless numbers among young black males. A month before the release of the current...

The Pentagon's defiant pledge to stick with the Rush Limbaugh show, no matter what, bumps up against a few hard and insulting realities. The Armed Forces Network that carries the Limbaugh show is not a private business, corporation, or proprietorship that can do whatever it pleases with its money, personnel,...

Rush Limbaugh did not apologize to Sandra Fluke. In his ten line "apology" statement to Fluke he devoted all of two lines to a tepid, kind of sort of "I made a mistake" pronouncement in branding her "a slut." In the rest of the statement he railed against...

The U.S. Supreme Court almost certainly will vote before the November presidential elections on whether to scrap race as a factor in college admissions. The conservative majority has time and again tipped their hand that they are chomping to do away with it. The recusal of moderate justice Elena Kagan...