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Pundits Defend Joe Biden Record of Dog-Whistle Politics Feature photo
Opinion & Analysis

Pundits Rewrite History to Defend Biden’s Record of Dog-Whistle Politics

Savoring Every Bite: Cheering the Fall of Black America’s Scold

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.

Bill Cosby speaks to students during at a tribute marking the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education at Riverside Church in Manhattan, N.Y., Monday, Feb. 2, 2004. Cosby got serious with 500 ninth-graders at a talk commemorating the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling. The event was hosted by Columbia University's Teachers College, where Cosby's son Ennis was a doctoral student when he was fatally shot in 1997. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

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

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Nuttier than a Fruitcake: White America’s Racial Psychopathy

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.

A group of President Donald Trump supporters is seen from the media van traveling in the president's motorcade en route to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Feb. 3, 2018. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

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 character. The two

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Taming MLK’s Radical Legacy in the Fight Against White Supremacy

It is an opportune time to put the spotlight on white supremacy in relation to King’s legacy now, as Donald Trump and his Republican Party pursue an extreme right-wing agenda that is emboldening open racism and bigotry.

Sakidra Davis of Alpha Rho Xinos carries an image of Martin Luther King Jr. during the 32nd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration's March/Parade on Saturday Jan. 18, 2014, in Dallas, Texas. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Sarah Hoffman)

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. left behind a legacy of courage and clarity in the face of racial and economic injustice. It has been five decades since the world lost this visionary—the preeminent leader of the Civil Rights Movement—but his words and actions continue to inspire the fight for democracy and racial equality today. However, since

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March For Our Lives: A New Generation Sets Aside Tribalism for a Progressive Cause

The dynamism and interracial character of last week’s March For Our Lives rallies provides further evidence that American workers have a chance of challenging the wealthy for a bigger piece of the pie only when they put their tribal differences aside to fight together.

Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, along with students and speakers at the March For Our Lives rally in Washington on March 24, 2018. (EPA/Shawn Thew)

WASHINGTON -- Google the name “Tallulah Bankhead” and you will be regaled (or mortified if your mores tend to the Victorian) with tales of the actor’s libertine appetites, her breakout performance in the Hitchcock classic Lifeboat, or her half-camp, half-vamp villainess in the 1960s Batman television series. Wikipedia references her patrician mien

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Vichy Journalism on Steroids: Obama and the New Wave of “All-Good” Black Journalism

Barack Obama has inspired a coterie of black writers who have largely foregone reportage and robust interrogation for a kind of anger management, in an apparent attempt to reassure African-Americans that, despite losing more of their wealth than at any time in history, everything is swell.

President Barack Obama talks with his personal aide Reggie Love, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, and Director of Political Affairs Patrick Gaspard, aboard Marine One. Aug. 9, 2010. (Pete Souza)

WASHINGTON (Analysis) -- Shortly after a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder for the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, the celebrated African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: I think the jury basically got it right. The only real eyewitness to the death of Trayvon Martin was the man who killed him.

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Left, Undone: As Women March, Blacks Increasingly Question the Quality of their Allies

“The point for me,” said one 41-year-old African-American who works in Silicon Valley, “is that black people in America can trust no one but each other. This world means us harm and nobody has our back; you’d have to be a fool to believe otherwise.”

Skylar Barrett walks alone with an American flag in the middle of the street during a march through the Buckhead neighborhood against the recent police shootings of African-Americans on July 11, 2016, in Atlanta. (AP/David Goldman)

Forty years ago last fall, the late Richard Pryor took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl for a gay rights fundraiser and delivered what was perhaps the most incendiary monologue of a career that was both famously -- and literally -- combustible. What the audience of 17,000 mostly gay, white men anticipated was to be regaled by the virtuoso in his

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