Richard M. Benjamin

What a pungent irony for President Obama to deliver his major speech on immigration reform on the threshold of Independence Day: The issue and the holiday dredge up and expose our nation's conflicted attitudes toward immigrants - and toward our own national values.

America's...

President Barack Obama has helped inspire an historic batch of black Americans to run for Congress - against his own party.

32 black Republicans, a record-high number, are now running for the US House of Representatives, as reported in Alternet.

The Root calls the milestone a...

Tea Party protesters are gathering at anti-tax rallies nationwide.

But not everybody is angry about tax day.

In a USA Today op-ed, I argue that paying one's "fair share" of taxes is patriotic and pro-business.

The White House confirmed today that Obama checked only the "Black, African Am., or Negro" box on his 2010 Census form.

He could have checked "white." Or even "some other race." He could have even written in "multiracial."

Like Obama's extended clan, my family members have complexions like...

Joe Stack's eerie suicide screed rips the curtain open and reveals a bitter bile this country does not know what to do with.

Liberals will surely dismiss Stack's rant as a broiling anti-government battle cry -- Tea Party on steroids. Conservatives will dismiss it...

The Tea Party movement, holding its first convention this weekend, angles to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and deed, since at least the 1960s Counter Culture.

Only this time the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.

The boiling movement...

Confronted with political minefields and enormous national problems, President Obama delivered a brilliant speech on multiple levels. For those unable to grasp -- never mind appreciate -- the President's address in all its nimble luster, here is a lexicographer's guide:

Afghanistan ("Gays should have...

Forgive, for a moment, some biographical speculation: Were Martin Luther King, Jr. living, he would not be bothered by the racial brushfires of late (Glenn Beck's rebuke of African-American as a "bogus, PC term," Harry Reid's Negro musings, and the Census' use of that label).

Instead, he would be...

Harold Ford presents a formidable challenge to New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Why? The former Tennessee congressman is a light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one. This makes him palatable...

Is Bill Sparkman -- the 51-year old US Census fieldworker found hanged in rural southeastern Kentucky with the word "Fed" scrawled across his chest -- a victim of hate crime directed at Uncle Sam? Or the casualty of drug-related violence in a struggling pocket of America?

To date, nobody knows...

At the White House tonight, Bam, James, and Skip are resolving America's race problem. Over a BEER.

Not a Pomegranate 'Tini. Not a Creole Julep. Not a Cape Cod. Not a Gin Rickey. And definitely not a White Lady (1 oz gin, 1 oz orange liqueur, 1 oz lime...

The threesome -- or Man Date -- between the President, Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley, and Skip Gates bears the slight fingerprints of David Axelrod.

The President's 2008 campaign put a premium on comforting skittish white voters to look past Obama's skin color and...

Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger

Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge

These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The...

Frank Ricci just wanted to ace his firefighters exam.

He rallied to overcome dyslexia and "several learning disabilities." He spent more than $1,000 to purchase study materials and to pay his neighbor to read them on tape to him. And never mind the 8 to 13 hours a day he...

"The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries."

This comment comes not from Paul Krugman or a lefty think tank, but from a discharged GI writing his hometown newspaper in Lockport, NY, during the winter...

President Obama has chosen one tough, intellectually dazzling, judicially seasoned woman as his Supreme Court pick.

If confirmed, the Princeton (summa cum laude) and Yale Law School standout, would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years, and more overall judicial experience...

Fine-tuning the treacly, Baby Boomer, 60s-holdover race coverage it excels at, the New York Times tells us "Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism" (Sunday, May 3, A1).

"I go to a gym where there are a number of black people," Mr. Schmidt, a white man, chirps. "We don't...

Ever been to those "The Future of Journalism" media panels? They sound more like "Old Scribes Mourn the Past" panels. And the panelists invariably look like Statler & Waldorf, the two old Muppets sitting in the opera box seats.

The Journalism Establishment has a tough time seeing new media as...

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Barack Obama's "evil twin," his racial Alter Ego: Eric Holder.

Barack avoids discussing race like the plague - ever hear the words "el Barrio," "reparations," "Asian math whiz" escape his lips? But his Attorney General just unleashed a racial tongue lashing on Americans.

Holder called America...