For those who have seen the ugliness and heard the vitriol emanating from the mouths of persons attending McCain/Palin rallies this past week — what with their demands to kill Barack Obama, slurs that he is a terrorist and a traitor, and paranoid delusions about his crypto-Muslim designs on America — please know this: This […]
Thanks to everyone who has responded to my latest piece, “This is how fascism comes,” and for the thought-provoking feedback, especially begun by Adam Mansbach, who I consider to be a wonderful writer and strong antiracist ally. (if you haven’t seen the conversation, check out the thread below the essay on my facebook homepage). Given […]
I guess it would be amusing were it not so sad. After several days of combing through hateful diatribes, aimed at me because of previous commentaries I had written concerning racism and white privilege in the presidential campaign, it struck me: one of the most disturbing things about white racists is how they manage to […]
If hypocrisy were currency, conservatives would be able to single-handedly bail out the nation’s free-falling financial system in less than a week, without the rest of us having to front so much as a penny. So on the one hand, folks like this always tell others–especially the poor and people of color–to take “personal responsibility” […]
Sigh. I guess I should have expected it, seeing as how it’s nothing new. I write a piece on racism and white privilege (namely, the recently viral, “This is Your Nation on White Privilege”), lots of folks read it, many of them like it, and others e-mail me in fits of apoplexy, or post scathing […]
To hear an awful lot of white folks tell it, the problem with black people is that they just don’t want to work hard enough in school. They act up and refuse to study or get good grades, because they don’t want to be put down for “acting white.” In other words, the African American […]
For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a […]
…Yeah, I said it, and I meant it too. The New Yorker staffers and editors who thought it was acceptable to run the cover of Barack-and-Michelle-Obama-as-Muslim-and/or-black-nationalist-militants are racists. And assholes. Their liberalism does not acquit them. The fact that most of them will probably vote for Obama in November doesn’t acquit them. The fact that […]
When Jeremiah Wright said that the U.S. has a history of violence against innocent people–the kind of thing that fits the textbook definition of the term, “terrorism”–and that this history can, at least in part, explain the attacks against us on September 11, 2001, he was excoriated in the press and by the public. How […]
To paraphrase and slightly change an old saying: “It’s better to be thought a liar than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.” It’s a maxim that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia should probably have heeded, given his majority opinion in the court’s decision this week, tossing out Washington D.C.’s ban on handguns. For […]
