Category: Color of Law

Please excuse me while I grieve for my boy… The other day I was walking through the maternity ward At Pennsylvania Hospital, And a nurse asked me if I was an expectant father. I told her no, my baby just died. Later that day, a man asked me if I was expecting a baby, I…

Whither labor movement? Should labor unions concern themselves solely with the wages and benefits of their own dues-paying membership, or should they also care about the plight of the unemployed? Should labor focus merely on conditions of workers in the United States, or broaden their scope to address globalization and the international flows of capital?…

We live in extreme times, and positive action of an extreme nature is needed. Capitalism once again is unraveling, as corporate greed and policies of upward wealth distribution take their toll on the common folk. Dinosaur industries such as Big Oil are rewarded for their damage to the environment and are profiting from our misery.…

In his dissent, Justice Breyer noted that the D.C. law did not violate the Second Amendment, but rather protected an important interest – dealing with the life-threatening presence of firearms in our cities. He invoked the sobering statistics on handgun-related crimes, deaths and accidents in the District and in the nation as a whole, statistics…

Recently, in Philadelphia I heard the most insulting radio commercial of all time. It was an ad for Philadelphia Gas Works, or PGW, a local city-owned utility. The narrator, a woman, lectures to the audience that if they do not pay their gas bill, PGW will cut off their service. In the background, throughout the…

Are the spouses of the presidential candidates fair game? Republican presidential candidate John McCain – as well as McCain surrogates at Fox News and elsewhere – seems to think they are open for attack, particularly when they are Black. The Far Right decided to wage warfare against Michelle Obama after she stated in a Feb.…

In its narrative, the NBRA conveniently omits the role of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in steering White segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and winning elections by appealing to White fears of African Americans. It started with Nixon, following Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, which ensured a massive…

There was, at best, token coverage of statements made by two of McCain’s supporters, Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, and Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Parsley said that America was founded to destroy Islam, which he calls a false religion. Meanwhile, Hagee – who…

Incarceration is perhaps America’s leading method of social control. With 2.5 million in the nation’s jails and prisons – 7 million people when you include people on probation and parole – the U.S. accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners, the world’s largest prison population. An important factor which is fuelling the alarming growth…

Americans always were told that they lived in the greatest country on Earth, a model egalitarian society. But a report by The Pew Charitable Trusts sheds light on the fallacy of the so-called American Dream. According to the report, America is less upwardly-mobile than Canada, Denmark or Finland. In the land of opportunity, your birth,…