Am I the only one who finds it a bit too coincidental that in the midst of a political season in which conservative whites can be heard screaming that they “want their country back,” the Governor of Virginia should declare April “Confederate History Month?” Or that others would be clamoring for the inclusion of a [...]

Tim Wise delivers a Keynote address for MLK Day, January, 2010 at Fountain Baptist Church, Summit New Jersey. Listen to the speech

There is none so dangerous as the white American who waxes nostalgic about what he or she likes to call “the good old days.” Or, alternately, those “simpler” times, or the era of so-called “innocence” remembered from their childhoods, memorialized in a Norman Rockwell painting, or via televised re-runs of the Cleaver family, or Opie [...]

Van Jones, special advisor to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, has resigned from the administration. To be honest, he was forced out. Oh, perhaps not directly, but if not, then by the stunning silence of his employer. An employer more concerned about appeasing the right-wing bullies who sought to make Jones a liability for [...]

My political entry into the left (and by this I mean the real left, beyond the Democratic Party) came a little more than twenty years ago in New Orleans, when, as a college student I became involved in the fight against U.S. intervention in Central America. In particular, the groups of which I was a [...]

Published as a ZNet Commentary One thing can be said for conservatives: they are nothing if not unoriginal. This truism was driven home yet again recently when I found myself in a debate over affirmative action with such a person, who insisted that folks like me, by virtue of our support for the concept, had [...]

Published on Counterpunch.org, 11/08/03 David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, has been making the rounds lately, promoting his new book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity. Therein, Limbaugh claims that the left, broadly defined, is doing everything possible to eliminate all mention of the nation’s majority faith from the public square. Limbaugh digs up [...]

Published as a ZNet Commentary, October 28, 2001, also in The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace, Beacon Press, 2003. To hear those who support the current air assault on Afghanistan tell it, those of us who doubt the likely efficacy of such a campaign, and who question its fundamental morality are not [...]

Published as a ZNet Commentary, September 24, 2000 That I’m no Biblical scholar is an understatement of monumental proportions. Yet I recently found myself, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, thinking of the following verse from the book of Matthew, if memory serves: Why behold the mote in thy brother’s eye, but consider not the beam [...]

They came in the mail again, even though I never ordered them: those personal address labels that say, “Teach Tolerance.” You know, the ones sent out by the Southern Poverty Law Center: America’s favorite civil rights organization. You know, the one run by Morris Dees: America’s favorite crusader for, well, tolerance; which, in turn, is [...]