Category: Guest Commentary

Carol Moseley Braun’s candidacy for President of the United States is now history. Ambassador Braun, the first African American woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, used her time on the campaign trail to champion issues such as pay equity, single payer health care and economic development. Although her voice and beautiful smile will be…

A mantra those of us in research methodology like to evoke goes as follows: Like beauty, the meaning of data is in the eyes of the beholder. Indeed, it was mathematician Henri Poincare who made the poignant observation that “Science is built up with facts as a house is with stones. But a collection of…

When Zimbabwe recently declared to the world that continuing public humiliation by the British Commonwealth, and its curb on the country’s right to self-determination were too high a price to pay for membership in that body, the Southern African nation followed the sterling example set by Guinea 45 years ago. In 1958, as France read…

Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African-American anthropologist and writer of the Harlem Renaissance, studied a practice in the Segregationist South she referred to as “Paramour Rights,” picking up a term she encountered in the timber camps of north Florida ranging from Jacksonville through Pensacola. This unwritten law of the pre-Civil War South referred to the…

The Bush administration is pushing a dangerous agenda that will set back the gains of the Civil Rights movement for generations. The administration has been taken over by an extremist ideology referred to as “neo-conservatism” or, for short, “neo-con.” The name neo-con is misleading because there is nothing new, or “neo,” about this con. Neo-cons…

In 1864, Colonel John Chivington surveyed his troops with pride as they galloped into a Colorado town. The locals cheered these “brave” cavalry men who were returning from their recent massacre of the “savages” at Sand Creek. The mounted soldiers waved more than a few newly harvested scalps of elderly Indian men. But more than…

[In mid-October the U.S. Army canceled a contract to process deadly VX chemical weapons agents in a Dayton, Ohio neighborhood. Maddi Breslin is one of the people who made it happen. Her friends know her as Maddi Bee.] We the People stopped the Army more effectively than a hundred thousand Chinese in Tianamen Square. The…

No single act by terrorists in recent history has resulted in the devastation of relations between states, peoples and the international political order as has the destruction of the twin towers in New York and the wing of the Pentagon on September 11th 2001. The victims of that horror have been multiplied by the subsequent…

Kobe Bryant, like OJ did, stands at the crossroads of two American myths: Kobe is a Black man accused of raping a White woman and a beloved sports-figure. What happens when America’s dream meets America’s nightmare? When God Bless America meets Birth of a Nation? What does race have to do with it? The media…

I guess ESPN got what it wanted: a jump in ratings by hiring Rush Limbaugh. Mission accomplished, but at what price? My family and I began an immediate boycott of ESPN as soon as we heard that Limbaugh, a non-football analyzing, racist, misogynist, big fat idiot (as described by humorist, Al Franken), was hired to…