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N.Y.P.D. Officer Pleads Guilty to Civil Rights Violation

The Editors — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:52:57 +0000

By The Editors
The bullying swagger of Michael Daragjati, once apparently his perverse badge of honor, was nowhere in evidence earlier this week as he sat in Brooklyn’s federal district court.

Does This Guy’s Face Look Familiar?

The Editors — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:01:35 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
Mike O’Neal, Speaker of the House for the state of Kansas, came to national attention this week because early in the week he forwarded from his personal e-mail account an e-mail that likened First Lady Michelle Obama to the Dr. Seuss character, the Grinch – because of a photograph of her with windblown hair – and included a sneering reference to her as “Mrs. YoMama.”

Implicit Bias: A Forum

The Editors — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 02:59:08 +0000

The September/October newsletter of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council presents a vitally important exchange of views on the much-discussed issue of implicit bias.

The Perry Camp Names Have Meanings

The Editors — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:00:44 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
“Niggerhead” was far from being the only place in Texas or many other states in the South and North that whites felt driven to dishonor with slurs against black Americans. What that compulsion signified – how profoundly saturated with anti-black racism America was – is the point that stands at the center of this controversy.

Same Old Tradition; New Faces

The Editors — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:16:56 +0000

By The Editors
For the last decade or so, we’ve been treated to a concentrated dose of one of the grand traditions of American history: the assertion that U.S.-born black Americans are last on the pecking order of American ethnic groups who “contribute” to American society.

Warning: Cesspool Overload Coming

The Editors — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:22:18 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
Warning to all who intend to follow the 2012 presidential election: better have a sturdy pair of hip waders handy, because the muck right-wing extremists and fellow-travelers have been shoveling out of the cesspool of American society into the respectable political discourse since President Obama took office is likely to become a deluge.

Dime-Store Racist

The Editors — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:12:44 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
The first thing I noticed yesterday when I went searching on amazon.com for the books written by Frank Borzellieri, who has gained a certain notoriety in New York City in the last week, is that all three of them have a photograph of him on the cover.

The Civil War’s Unfinished Business

The Editors — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:24:37 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
Imagine, in the heart of Dixie, once the land of cotton, where, to some whites, the old times of white-over-black dominion are not only not forgotten but wistfully remembered, there’s a park that’s a memorial to treason.

Regretting Jim Crow: Richard H. Poff And the Costs of White Racism

The Editors — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 23:26:10 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
Given the fresh proof that the woeful neglect of American history in the schools has helped produce an astonishing ignorance of basic details of American history, it’s clearly foolish to expect that many today would recognize the name of Richard H. Poff.

What Becomes Justice Most?

The Editors — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 01:21:21 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
The story of the Virginia scholarships, to some degree, and, even more directly, of the state of Oklahoma’s refusal to properly compensate the Tulsa black community for Greenwood’s destruction casts into sharp relief the harm the post-Civil War century of legalized racism did to the ability of black American individuals, families and communities to gain and hold a solid economic footing in American society.

New Study Examines the Role of Race in Political Representation

The Editors — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:23:44 +0000

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Anyone who cites the election of Barack Obama as proof the country has gotten beyond race should consider what Yale University researchers discovered in a new study that shows discrimination persists in political representation.

The Monkey on the Tea Party’s Back

The Editors — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 02:01:10 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels and Stacey Patton
Another day. Another outrageous example of how deeply the election of a black American of mixed parentage has unhinged some conservative white Americans.

Racist Origins Taint Death Penalty Juries

The Editors — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 20:10:20 +0000

By Kenneth J. Cooper
The Supreme Court figured it had done the right thing when it decided a decade ago that defendants accused of capital crimes could only be sentenced to death by a jury, not a judge. Did the seven justices in the majority know that death-by-jury is tainted with racism at its core? Or maybe they didn’t care.

The Pretend Americans

The Editors — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 02:38:22 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels and F. Finley McRae
A deliberate refusal to acknowledge the reality right before their eyes has always been fundamental to the maintenance of white-racist thought and behavior in its many guises.

Some Things Never Change

The Editors — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:27:20 +0000

By The Editors
Shaun Winkler would have approved if American citizens, be they marchers or onlookers, gathered for a peaceful purpose, had been injured or killed by the exploding bomb.

Post-Civil War? Not Yet

The Editors — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:41:22 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
What were they thinking?

I’m referring to those three hundred or so whites who attended the Secession Gala in Charleston, South Carolina late last month on the exact 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s December 1860 secession from the United States.

Richard Nixon’s Bigotry

The Editors — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:03:24 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
“You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference …”
If only Richard Nixon had kept the bitter promise he spat out to reporters the day after losing the California gubernatorial election in November, 1962.

Dream Act Hits Roadblock In The Senate; Passage Endangered

The Editors — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:48:55 +0000

By The Editors
The Senate Thursday tabled legislation that would provide a clear route to citizenship for high school and college students in the U.S. illegally, raising the possibility that the push to pass it has failed.

PrimeLending Settles Federal Discrimination Complaint

The Editors — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:00:45 +0000

By Doug Miller
Facing prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), national mortgage lender PrimeLending has agreed to pay $2 million to African-American home buyers who the federal agency says were unfairly charged higher interest rates because of their race.

Three New Orleans Police Officers Convicted, Two Acquitted in the Post-Katrina Death of Henry Glover

The Editors — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:05:02 +0000

By The Editors
The legal reconstruction of and punishment for the whirlwind of lawlessness that coursed through the New Orleans police department in the wake of Hurricane Katrina five years ago took another step forward on Thursday, December 9.

Supreme Court Seals the Fate of James Ford Seale, Racist Murderer

The Editors — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:54:50 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
This week the U.S. Supreme Court turned the final key in the lock behind which sits James Ford Seale, one of the most violent of the white racist extremists who operated with impunity in much of the Deep South well into the 1960s.

The Racism of the Past Still Has an Effect

The Editors — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:54:26 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels The writer of the letter published in the Public Editor’s column of Saturday’s New York Times was as sardonic as he was correct about the unmistakable gender imbalance of the obituaries he read in “the paper of record.”

Where’s the ‘Content of Our Character’ Crowd Now?

The Editors — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:00:56 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels Since the election of Ronald Reagan especially, it’s become the mantra of the conservative quest to make racial bigotry not disappear but just become unacknowledged.

Teaching Black Kids to Cope with Racism

The Editors — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:04:49 +0000

By Tarice L. S. Gray Families are where children find acceptance, which is key to healthy growth and development.

55 Years Later, Emmett Till Murder Still Haunts

The Editors — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:58:51 +0000

By Stacey Patton
August 28th marks the 55th anniversary of the brutal murder of 14 year-old Emmett Louis Till. In the summer of 1955 he was forced out of his bed in the middle of the night at gunpoint by white men, thrown on the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a barn where he was beaten, castrated, and shot. His crime – whistling at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, the wife a Mississippi grocery store owner.