Free Republic

#YesWeCode looks to close the coding inequality gap Shortly after Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in February 2012, liberal activist Van Jones was talking with his friend Prince—yes, that Prince—about the circumstances of the shooting. More “I think he made the observation,” Jones told TIME, “that when African-American young people wear hoodies people think they’re thugs, but when white kids wear hoodies you assume that they’re going to be dot-com billionaires,” a reference to the outerwear favored by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. “We just started thinking: ‘Well, how do we turn that around?’” Out of that...

A white professor is suing Alabama State University (ASU) over claims the historically black university discriminated against him and his partner based on their race and sexual orientation. According to the lawsuit filed in federal court on June 11, Dr. John Garland is suing the ASU and eight current and former employees for racially discriminating against applicants for university positions and subsequently targeting him when he retaliated against those practices. “[Garland’s supervisor] expressed his opinion, stated or implied, that Dr. Garland did not belong at the University and was not ‘suited to [the University’s] type of students’ because Dr. Garland...

Nevertheless, those who recognized what they were looking at when they were called to jury duty during the Rudy Giuliani years (1994 – 2001) had no trouble understanding why crime was going down in New York City. My own experience told me all I needed to know about why the “good guys” had started to win the war to save the city. In May 1995 I was called to serve on a jury in Richmond County one of the five counties that make up New York City. I had served as a police officer in the county (known as Staten...

The vast majority of Americans are not racist. In fact, minorities in this country enjoy legal protections not found in many other countries, and the American spirit of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is pretty much the gauge by which the population lives. It is absurd, for example, to cry racism (Al Sharpton) when millions of white men rabidly cheer for mostly black professional sports teams. In 2008, the country even elected a black man as president. So it is with bitter irony that we note the escalation of race baiting at the highest levels of politics and media....

The full-page advertisement in Mississippi Link, a weekly newspaper aimed at black residents of Jackson, the state’s capital, urged readers to vote for Senator Thad Cochran in the June 3 Republican primary. That might be unremarkable except for one thing: The political action committee that paid for the ad shares an address and leadership with a local church. “All Citizens for Mississippi” did not appear to exist at the time of the ad’s publication. Its registration as a super PAC with the Federal Election Commission was posted online last week and contains one important clue about its origins. All Citizens...

Tupac would have turned 43 today. In age of Trayvon and Jordan Davis, here's why we have a hard time letting him go. Tupac Shakur lived for twenty-five years. I was nine years-old when he died and twenty-five seemed so grown to me. Twenty-five sounded like you had lived. It wasn’t until I started approaching twenty-five myself that I realized how close to black boyhood Tupac, born forty-three years ago to the day, was when he died. I think that’s part of the reason we have a hard time letting him go. For all of his faults (and there were...

Twenty years ago this week, former football great O.J. Simpson savagely attacked and killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. The double murder and subsequent trial generated a small library of videos and books, the most recent of the latter being Kim Goldman’s, Can't Forgive: My 20-Year Battle with O.J. Simpson. I just finished Goldman’s insightful memoir yesterday. I must have read at least ten other books on the case. A year ago this week, the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin began in Sanford, Florida. Although not as sensational as Simpson’s, Zimmerman’s...

To Make this story Understandable we Must first put Black Faces to these Biblical Character’s. This real life story begins with Adam and Eve and the Serpent ( Which was a Black Man also. ) Eve was seduced by the devil to eat from the tree of knowledge ( Which represents something valuable – today we call it money or an expensive gift ), And in exchange for it she cheated on her husband Adam with him ( That was the first act of Pimpology.), and through her Act of Adultery he impregnated her and Cain was born ( The...

According to the Beyond Diversity Resource Center (BDRC) the problem with working with Whites to end racism, something Gallup’s new poll tells us is statistically non-existent, as a concern of just 1% of Americans, is working with Whites. The BDRC is a bunch of phony race hustlers, comprised of cunning young Blacks (who want to be ready to work the race baiting game when Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are gone) and White-hating Whites looking for a way to be relative. These are their rules for HAVING to deal with Whites. Notice there is nothing about being angry enough to...

Don’t sleep. In a district that’s 20 percent black, if they played their cards right, Democrats could turn Rep. Cantor’s primary loss into a general election win. Pundits, prognosticators and backseat-driving know-it-alls are chatting up everything you need to know about House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) karma-driven primary loss Tuesday night, with politicos scrambling to understand David Brat: a once-puckish Tea Party upstart and Cantor twin with only $200,000 in the bank who managed to unseat the second most powerful cat in the House armed with $5 million plus. But, the Spidey sense should buzz after those third-eye folks...

Twenty years after the start of the O.J. Simpson murder case, attitudes towards Simpson and towards race relations in the country have dramatically changed, according to a new national poll. Monday night's release of the CNN/ORC International survey comes just a few days before 20th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, the former football star and actor's ex-wife, and of Ronald Goldman. The case against Simpson and the ensuing more than eight-month-long criminal trial, dubbed the "trial of the century," engrossed the nation. Simpson was eventually acquitted. According to CNN polling in 1994, a large majority of whites...

PARRIS ISLAND (WTOC) - The highest ranking enlisted Marine at Parris Island has stepped down from his position following last week's alleged assault with a former Marine. Parris Island released the following statement early Monday afternoon: Understanding the Marine Corps has very high standards of personal and professional conduct for its most senior leaders, Sgt. Maj. Archie voluntarily stepped down as the depot sergeant major, and the commanding general regrettably accepted his retirement. People all over the country have reacted to this viral video between protester and former Marine Ethan Arguello and Depot Sgt. Maj. Paul Archie. The altercation began...

In 1887, ex-slaves began petitioning the federal government for pensions and compensation for the years they had labored without wages before abolition. When Congress ignored their thousands of petitions, they tried to sue for wage theft but were told they could not. At the very least, the descendants of the tens of thousands of members of the Ex-Slave Pension and Bounty movement – whose membership forms stated the number of years they had been working as slaves, along with the names of their slave owners and the plantations on which they lived – should be eligible for reparations. Other individuals...

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations. For some, reparations to African Americans for enslavement and state-sanctioned apartheid (more benignly known as “Jim Crow”) is a shocking case to make. I am a sociologist whose training has been, in part, with economists like Sandy Darity at Duke University and Darrick Hamilton at The New School. For Darity, Hamilton, and many other serious scholars of race, history, and inequality, the matter of reparations is anything but novel or shocking. Neither is it hyperbolic. There are real...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NNPA) – More than 200 African American men, ranging from a taxi driver to university professors, sent a letter to President Obama on Tuesday urging him to expand his Black male initiative to include Black girls and women, saying they were “surprised and disappointed” that the president had sought to include only half of the race to tackle community-wide issues. A copy of the letter to Obama was obtained by the NNPA News Service. After praising the president for saying that addressing the needs of those left behind is as important as anything else he is undertaking, authors...

We previously addressed The dead-end Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ backwards looking road to nowhere: Coates never gives the answer as to who gets what and how. And that’s ultimately the problem with reparations arguments that are not based upon the people causing the harm paying the people directly harmed by specific conduct soon after the conduct is remedied. As Coates explained his views to Melissa-Harris Perry this morning, it became clear that there is no sense at all of holding the guilty accountable in the sense we normally do, or compensating actual victims. There is a complete disconnect between...

A high school in Clinton, Tennessee, in December 1956. Reparations wouldn't just be about America's slaveholding era.With “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic sets slavery aside to focus on the long plunder of the 20th century, in which whites used coercion, violence, and government to exclude blacks from the bounty of American prosperity. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s was vital, but it wasn’t a panacea, and the problems of today—from the racial wealth gap to the crumbling ghettos of the Midwest—stem from the racist policies of our recent past. Or, as Coates puts it, “White...

On Friday, Rush Limbaugh opened his radio show by diving into recent comments Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made about how own struggles with “bigotry” and “prejudice.” Limbaugh did not seem to have any particular problems with what Cuban said, but was rather offended by his subsequent apology to Trayvon Martin’s family for using a “black kid in a hoodie” as one example of who he would avoid on a dark street. “I know I’m prejudiced and I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways,” Cuban said at Nashville, Tennessee’s GrowCo Conference. “If I see a black kid...

A California history teacher’s decision to dress as Trayvon Martin for his school’s yearbook photo has drawn a mixed reaction, KTUV reports. Spencer Smith (pictured center) is seen flashing the peace symbol while wearing a white hoodie and holding Skittles. Martin had just purchased the candy shortly before his death. Smith was reportedly attempting to make a political statement. Watch a news report about Smith’s photo here: (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Some have come out in support of Smith; others remain unsure. Alfreda Charway, president of Brentwood Heritage High School’s Black Student Union, called it “a good idea because he’s expressing himself.” “Because that’s...

The 15,000+ word essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, is getting completely predictable reactions. It’s looooong, which gives it a perceived weight which just is not there. In fact, there’s not much new there, except for historical anecdotes shedding detail but not light on what we already knew to be the history of slavery, segregation and discrimination: "… the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that...