Category: Guest Commentary

Introduction: In the mid 1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a young parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Haiti’s capital city Port-au-Prince. A courageous champion of the rights and dignity of the poor, he soon became the most widely respected spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that…

Disparities in wealth – or net worth – have shaped the financial inequality existing between blacks and whites for generations, even as racial income differences have somewhat narrowed. That was the authoritative view of a pair of prominent scholars 10 years ago when they published a groundbreaking book on the subject. Now those experts, Melvin…

Four years ago, almost to the date, with the world’s eye focused on the city of Atlanta and the State of Georgia, I stood with scores of people on the steps of the Georgia State Capital in Defense of Marcus Dixon, in opposition to mandatory minimum sentencing. There, on March 1st, we passionately pleaded with…

In a span of less than one week, US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, has managed to simultaneously both deeply insult and negate Black America, while courting what appears to be an increasing amount of white Americans.Many of these white Americans are in flagrant denial of their own color privilege and racism, and clearly grasp that…

I am watching Senator Barack Obama’s announcement of his Presidential candidacy on C-Span. He is so smart, so sensible, so easy to listen to … and so impressive! My kids are bored — they’ve had a bit too much politics in their lives lately — but I want them to see history unfolding. Yes, today…

A favorite mantra of politicos is “all politics is local”. It’s a catch-all phrase that dismisses problems because of lack of an immediate local impact. The problem with “all politics is local” is that civil rights issues are never simply local. Best said by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “injustice anywhere is a threat to…

As we enter this month dedicated to celebrating the struggle, accomplishments, and significant contributions of Americans of African descent, there is much to note and commemorate. Vitally important, however, is that we do not fail to mention the historical—and continuing—ability of the black community in America to produce some of our nation’s most powerful voices…

Baltimore, MD – McGuire Hall, at Loyola College, a Jesuit institution, was standing room only, on the evening of Feb. 6, 2007, as David Simon, the creator of the popular HBO program, The Wire, began his talk. His lecture was part of the school’s Humanities Symposium. While a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper,…

This MyDD blog entry and this Politico article describe this PDF showing the results of a poll of all 100 U.S. Senators. It asks how they voted on the war in 2002, whether they regret that vote, whether they support escalating the war, and whether they support ending the war by a certain date. This…

I recently read several articles, written by black authors, questioning Senator Obama’s blackness. The argument appears to be that since Senator Obama is not the descendant of West Africans forcibly brought to this country in chains, he doesn’t get to claim blackness. Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates wrote on February 1 that it doesn’t matter to these…