American white supremacy is akin to a religious cult: motivated by ignorance and fear, a critical mass of Whites regard non-Whites in much the same way that villagers in Salem regarded the witches they burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft.
Remembering the sucker-punches that “the Cos” delivered to their cause, there is no shortage of blacks who today are basking in the afterglow of a race traitor getting his comeuppance for trafficking in the worst Amos-n-Andy racial tropes.
INDIANAPOLIS –- The four of us, all black men, watched in stunned silence as the news unfurled across the barber shop’s television screen: a jury in Pennsylvania had found Bill Cosby guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home. Finally, my barber broke the silence: I hope they serve pound cake in jail.” The room erupted in
With a cartoonish bigot in the White House, state terror that is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, and epochal inequality, there is, as of old, a whiff of insanity in white Americans’ racial attitudes, a hint of a nation coming unglued, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
INDIANAPOLIS -- Were it not, perhaps, for Stanley Kubrick’s deft direction, the fight scene in the 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus might well have been laughable rather than iconic. At nearly six-feet-four-inches tall, the African gladiator Draba, played by the former pro football star, Woody Strode, towered over Kirk Douglas’s eponymous
With the American Empire at its nadir and seeking both absolution and scapegoats, black journalists, academics, police, filmmakers and philanthropists are the post-Obama Orientalists, increasingly charged with writing about people of color for white people.
NEW YORK -- In her 1993 bestseller, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, the African-American author Jill Nelson wrote that when newsrooms and police departments began to integrate following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., white journalists and
An estimated 80 percent of Black-owned farmland in the south had disappeared since 1969.
“It was almost as if the earth was opening up and swallowing Black farmers.” This passage is from Pete Daniel's book titled “Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights.” It alludes to the untold acres of land seized from Black farmers and rural landowners over the last century. Though
From secret FBI spy programs to funneling Facebook data, Black social movements have faced years of state surveillance.
(ANALYSIS) --- From the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, surveillance technology has changed but the targets have remained the same. The excuses used to justify spying on Black social movements remain strikingly similar throughout the decades. Now, the very tools that movements have used to organize themselves – technology and
Efforts by the Justice Department under President Barack Obama to improve accountability are likely to be dashed under Trump administration.
Despite the protests, media scrutiny, and all around heightened national attention, young black men in 2016 continued to be the predominant victims of police violence in the United States.
