As Gary Younge points out in this week's Nation, racism in GOP campaign rhetoric has returned with a pungency we haven't seen for decades. In Iowa two weeks ago Rick Santorum stated that he didn't "want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody...

Japan's desperate struggle to contain the nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors should bring Obama's attempt to reintroduce nuclear power in the US to a grinding halt. Instead, the administration has responded with an anxious defense of nuclear power. Indeed, energy secretary Stephen Chu told Congress on the 15th...

Complaints by Republican leaders of what John McCain called a "stunning double standard" between the treatment of Trent Lott and Harry Reid over racially insensitive comments speak not to the hypocrisy of the Democrats, but rather to the lingering racism of the GOP. In his remarks in December 2002, at...

The growing visibility of the birther movement underscores both the enduring power of race in American politics, as well as the enduring cultural symbolism of the American presidency. The birther movement is not merely the province of increasingly vocal paranoics, as some commentators would have it. Rather it is increasingly...

As we all know, the dominant explanation coming out of Oregon and Kentucky's differing Democratic primary results will go like this: Oregonians are wealthier, better-educated and racially homogeneous, and therefore free of the kind of racial politics we have seen in other states recently. Hence their support for Obama. Kentuckians,...