If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
I decided to kick start my Gay Pride Week off by returning to my activist roots and attending the silent march against the NYPD policy of "Stop & Frisk" on Sunday, June 17 in New York City.
'Stop and frisk' criminalizes our youth, creates further distrust between the community and police, and doesn't do a thing to keep us safer. It used to be that we feared driving while Black; in New York and around the nation, we now fear simply walking down the street while Black or Latino.
The silent Father's Day March will be a chance for people of all backgrounds to walk silently down New York's Fifth Avenue together to convey to New York City leaders that it is time to stop treating hundreds of thousands of our young people of color like criminals when they have done nothing wrong.
Yes, there's a double-standard. And until there's full equality and the long slow process of racial healing is completed, the double-standard has to remain.
I haven't spoken with Al Sharpton in a few months. But if we were still speaking and he were to ask me what to do with the mother of Trayvon Martin, my answer would be very simple: Get her off the stage right now.
Now that George Zimmerman has been charged in Trayvon Martin's death, I am wondering what's next. I'm not talking about the next steps in the judicial process, I want to know what's next when it comes to America's relationship with race.
I feel extremely bad and incredibly worried for Barack Obama. I like the president and most of his policies. However, the Trayvon Martin circus has grown so big and unruly, it threatens to derail the president's much-deserved second term.
There are two sides to every story. So, why do the media sometimes run whole hogged with the most sensational version of events and why do we eat it ...
Trayvon Martin's death is a tragedy. Even if Zimmerman didn't intend evil, justice requires holding him responsible for killing Martin, who appears to have been guilty of nothing other than being the wrong race and wrong age in the wrong place at the wrong time.
While Howard Kurtz has had an esteemed career as a media critic, his TV and tweet critique of MSNBC and the Rev. Al Sharpton Sunday seems like an attempt to appear balanced purely for the sake of appearing balanced.
We love drama. We love to protest. We love to fight for a cause. That's what makes us American. But, what also makes us American is due process, justice, the presumption of innocence.
The fight for LGBT rights comes down to the very basic truth that for equality to have real meaning, fairness and equal treatment under the law must extend to everyone.
Will Americans reward a party that is systematically seeking to make it harder to vote? Will they accept routine harassment of minorities because of their fears about immigration? Will the politics of division once more be effective?
Today, when voter ID laws have crept into dozens of states, and one of the toughest and most reprehensible anti-immigration bills passed in Alabama, we will gather once again in the deep South and march.
In a recent article, Professor Cornel West "went H.A.M." on Tulane University Professor, Melissa Harris-Perry. I was both impressed and shocked that West had been so strong in his position on Harris-Perry, and I was glad to see that even millionaires aren't afraid to tell the truth.
