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Later today, “Los Angeles will celebrate Martin Luther King Day on Monday with a parade and community service work designed to honor the slain civil rights leader.” All very well and good, but I can’t help thinking that the nation still hasn’t quite figured out how to honor King’s birthday. This is a problem with [...]
Archive for the ‘Race & related -isms’ Category
January 7th, 2012
by Keith Humphreys
I do not understand why so many people are calling the recent racial remarks of several GOP presidential candidates “dog whistles”. In politics, a dog whistle is a coded/oblique remark that sounds inane to most people but is a signal with a particular meaning to others. Teresa Wiltz cuts to the chase: Some would call [...]
Posted: Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at
8:09 am
10 Comments »
December 12th, 2011
by Jonathan Zasloff
Category: Campaign 2012, Middle East Politics, Nationalism, Race & related -isms, Watching Conservatives
…and it doesn’t matter. Thoughtful voices across the political spectrum and the world have rightfully been attacking Gingrich for calling the Palestinians an “invented people.” But let’s be clear on what Gingrich is wrong about. You don’t need Gingrich to tell you that the idea of a “Palestinian people” is relatively new. All you need [...]
Posted: Monday, December 12th, 2011 at
4:43 pm
28 Comments »
December 9th, 2011
by Kelly Kleiman
Category: History, Infrastructure, Policy Analysis, Race & related -isms, Transportation, Unemployment, Unions and organizing
If the conversation about the end of the U.S. Postal Service sounds familiar, it’s not just because we’ve heard variations of it since 1970, when the old Post Office Department became a separate business. It’s also because the destruction of mail delivery closely parallels the wrecking of American passenger rail. Apparently the Congress has it [...]
Posted: Friday, December 9th, 2011 at
9:09 am
Tags: " African Americans, Amtrak, Post Office, Postal Service, racism
31 Comments »
December 7th, 2011
by Keith Humphreys
Jonathan Chait’s much-discussed essay in New York magazine indicted the left for being perennially, loudly and unrealistically disappointed in Democratic Presidents. In Chait’s view, much of the left ignores the constraints on Presidential power (e.g., Congress, of which Drew Westen et al seem to be in ignorance) and doesn’t have the stomach or attention span [...]
Posted: Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at
11:30 am
Tags: Jonathan Chait
39 Comments »
September 15th, 2011
by Harold Pollack
Category: Race & related -isms, Republican Party
“At one point in our conversation, he wondered aloud if Obama would play the race card….”
Posted: Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at
8:36 am
16 Comments »
August 28th, 2011
by Harold Pollack
Category: Arts reviews, Race & related -isms
The Help‘s female antagonists were depicted cruelly and stereotypically. Allegorical denial of their humanity does a disservice to these perpetrators of racial injustice. Oddly enough, it also does a disservice to their victims.
Posted: Sunday, August 28th, 2011 at
9:01 pm
11 Comments »
August 18th, 2011
by Harold Pollack
Category: Personal moment, Race & related -isms
The movie The Help is out. It concerns the complicated, intimate, unequal relationship between African-American domestic workers and the affluent white families who employ them. I haven’t seen the movie. Its reception calls to mind with surprising intensity two fuzzy memories from my early childhood. Until I was six years old, we lived in Teaneck, [...]
Posted: Thursday, August 18th, 2011 at
7:34 pm
7 Comments »
August 13th, 2011
by Harold Pollack
Category: Race & related -isms
Adam Serwer rightly calls out comedian Steve Harvey, who labels Tavis Smiley and Cornel West Uncle Toms in a particularly crude way. I’ve had some tough words for West. But I think Smiley and West’s poverty tour raises important concerns that might not otherwise gain a hearing. As Adam observes, “Tomming involves deliberately advancing the [...]
Posted: Saturday, August 13th, 2011 at
3:47 pm
4 Comments »
May 23rd, 2011
by James Wimberley
The maid did not charge DSK withrape becaus eshehad nothing to lose.
Posted: Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at
7:23 am
19 Comments »
