White supremacist congressman Steve King is sorry he gave you all “heartburn” by asking The New York Times what’s so “offensive” about being a white supremacist earlier this week, but that’s about it. King, who just entered his ninth term representing Iowa in Congress, took the House floor today to say he regretted making a […]
Race

NYT Article About White Nationalism Is Deeply Flawed
Police line up in front of counter-protesters at a far right rally in Portland, OR, in August. Photo: Getty White nationalism is resurgent in the streets of America. It’s driving federal policy in the Trump administration. It’s leading to the murders of people like Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. White supremacists are gunning people down in […]

Mark Luckie Q&A: Ex-Facebooker talks Racism in Tech
On November 8, Mark S. Luckie shared a lengthy memo with his co-workers before leaving his job at Facebook. In his 2,500-word note, which he releasedpublicly this past Tuesday, Luckie wrote that Facebook has “a black people problem,” and that it actively discriminates against both black Facebook users and its own black employees. Luckie, who previously […]

From ‘Dawson’s Creek’ to ‘Buffy’ to ‘Frasier’ to ‘Seinfeld’ — what happened to those lone, ‘token’ black actors?
This is about television in the 1990s, but let’s start with a quick, tragic and important trip to 1975. Happy Days is about to deliver its infamous and most cringeworthy episode. In “Fonzie’s New Friend,” the leather jacket-clad Fonz meets up with Sticks Downey, a new-to-town wisecracking drummer. The Fonz decides that Sticks, played with […]
Jay-Z Halted A Lawsuit By Pointing Out the Lack of Black Arbitrators – Rolling Stone
Jay-Z won a court battle on Wednesday in a lawsuit against his company Roc Nation, on somewhat unusual grounds: The rapper-entrepreneur argued that the lack of African-American arbitrators presiding over the case left him susceptible to unconscious racial bias. The suit has to do with Jay-Z’s Rocawear clothing brand, which he sold in 2007 to […]

Birthright Citizenship Was Won by Freed Slaves – The Atlantic
Birthright citizenship just might be, former slaves believed, the safeguard they needed. In the decades before the Civil War, in an era when a remedy like the Fourteenth Amendment was hard to imagine, free black Americans embraced the view that they were citizens by virtue of having been born on U.S. soil. It was a […]

The Political Lives of Mississippi Women, in Black and White — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
“We as black women, I guess, have gone through so much that we think it’s so much more important that we get involved and start some things,” said Clarke. Clarke’s reflex to get involved dates back decades before she won office (which she did at age 45, three years after learning she had multiple sclerosis). […]

Trump shocks with racist new ad days before midterms – CNNPolitics
The new web video, tweeted by the President five days before the midterm elections, is the most extreme step yet in the most inflammatory closing argument of any campaign in recent memory. The Trump campaign ad is the latest example of the President’s willingness to lie and fear-monger in order to tear at racial and […]

NBC Interviews White Nationalist on TV, For Some Reason
I regret to inform you that the national mainstream media is at it again: willingly giving a platform to white nationalists. On this morning’s TODAY show, NBC’s Peter Alexander interviewed the head of Identity Evropa, a racist group that describes itself as “identitarian” because it promotes white European “identity,” according to the Southern Poverty Law […]

The Deafening Silence of Colin Kaepernick – The New York Times
A tall, unemployed man took his niece to see Serena and Venus Williams play each other at the United States Open on Friday of last week. The man, a free-agent football player clad in a simple black T-shirt, was briefly shown on the video board at Arthur Ashe Stadium to thunderous applause from the crowd. […]