Racism

While covering the primary in West Virginia, I encountered pervasive racism only hinted at by Tuesday's exit polls and the pundits who wonder aloud if America is ready for a black president. What I heard on Tuesday was shocking, and it provides a dismal forecast as to Obama's chances of...

Her boyfriend had been one of the most popular and best students in the history of Just Like High School. He played first-chair saxophone in the Just Like High band. He won Anything That Got Decided By a Vote or a Debate. He got elected Governor of Boys State, and...

Last week, I wrote a piece that appeared about a harrowing experience that happened on a bus in a sleepy little town thirty miles outside of San Francisco.

Well, a glutton for punishment, I decided to take the same bus again, to see if I would see my friend...

As expected, Sen. Hillary Clinton crushed Sen. Barack Obama in yesterday's West Virginia primary. This result means very little, of course. Obama still has the most pledged delegates, the most superdelegates, and the most popular votes, and is still firmly on track to capture the Democratic Party's presidential nomination....

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has moved heaven and earth to keep race out of his campaign. He had no choice. He knew that if he gave even the faintest hint of a tilt toward black voters his campaign would be DOA. While early polls consistently showed that a crushing...

There are few writers I respect more, and have learned more from, than Susan Faludi. But she dangerously dismisses racism as a factor in drawing white male voters to Hillary Clinton's campaign in her New York Times op-ed essay this week Instead she endorses Clinton's archetype as a "brawler" who...

This Sunday, Frank Rich reported some of the most exciting news that has appeared on the pages of the New York Times in a very long time. According to Rich, Americans are on the verge of transcending the racial and cultural rifts that divided them for centuries. There simply...

The issue of race makes a lot of folks uncomfortable -- and that's especially true right now when the nation is closer than ever to electing the first black President of the United States. As my new newspaper column this week shows, many serious people who dominate our political...

If there were ever words that Hillary Clinton should take back it's her retort that hard working whites backed her in the primaries. The implication was that whites are the only ones who work hard. She obviously didn't mean that. Her awkwardly put point was simply that Obama has not...

Two thousand and eight is likely to be remembered as the year when the Democrats finally abandoned their base and cynically bent their knees to the will of Senate Republicans obsessed with slamming the door to homeownership closed to the minority, the female, the immigrant, and the working class...

Start with this: every national election has been about race. Go back as far as you want. You'll find the slavery-oriented elections, the immigration-oriented elections, the Jim Crow elections. You'll find civil rights as an issue before the eruption of the modern civil rights movement (1948 anyone?). There's Lyndon Johnson's...

April 30, 1968

With billy clubs swinging, bloodying heads, a phalanx of riot police stomped their way through the crowd of faculty supporters standing outside Fayerweather Hall. No one was given a chance to walk away.

The police then proceeded to smash in the main doors of...

This weekend, we attended a local conference for LGBT parents and families, and I spoke on a panel about interracial couples and intercultural families. At some point, I found myself speaking less as a gay dad and more as a black man raising two black sons, and wondering aloud just...

I found myself riveted by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s speech at the National Press Club yesterday and even more so by the immediate effect it had on Barack Obama's polls. I feel heart sick and appalled.

Like most of America, no matter what side of the political spectrum you're...

The elongated Democratic presidential contest is forcing racial politics to the forefront. In Pennsylvania the racial divide could not have been starker. Hillary Clinton ironically enough has become the down scale white people's champion. Now that this racial door has been fully opened, it is worth looking more deeply at...