Free Republic

The California congresswoman also vowed to keep pushing for the release of the President’s tax returns at the D.C. Tax March Congresswoman Maxine Waters was front and center calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump during the Tax March in Washington on Saturday. Protests took place in more than 150 cities across the country, urging the president to release his tax returns. Leading the D.C. crowd with chants of “impeach 45”, Auntie Maxine took the opportunity to push the campaign she started soon after Trump took office. “I don't respect this president. I don't trust this president. He's not...

The headline was numbingly familiar: “For Blacks, College is Not An Equalizer.” The op-ed in the Washington Post by Ray Boshara explored what he called a “troubling paradox,” namely that so many well-educated black Americans “feel so economically insecure.” It’s a startling fact, Boshara continued, “that blacks with college degrees have lost wealth over the past generation.” White college graduates “saw their wealth soar by 86 percent” between 1992 and 2013, while black college graduates experienced a loss of 55 percent over the same period. I made a little bet with myself as I read the piece: “Two-to-one he doesn’t...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said Wednesday that she is “stunned” President Trump and conservatives for attacking three prominent black women. In a tweet, Jackson listed American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan, fellow Democratic lawmaker Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.) and Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice as black women who have come under "attack" by the Trump administration and Republicans. (TWEET-AT-LINK) Jackson’s comments come hours after the president told The New York Times in an interview that he believes Rice likely committed a crime by requesting the names of Trump transition aides during an intelligence report....

In his new play "The Trial of Trayvon Martin," set to open April 6 in the Manny Fried Playhouse, Buffalo playwright Gary Earl Ross poses a simple question with a damning answer: What would have happened on Feb. 26, 2012 if the roles of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, whose deadly confrontation that evening helped to fuel a new movement for racial justice in America, had been switched? "Would Martin have been released because there was nothing to contradict his story?" Ross asked. "Or would he have been held until they found something to contradict his story?" Given what we...

By Lukas Mikelionis | 6:39 am, April 4, 2017 A Black Lives Matter chapter in Philadelphia has banned white people from attending an event, claiming it’s a “black only space.” According to the “April Open Meeting” event page on Facebook, the gathering, scheduled for April 15, is aimed at discussing future initiatives and projects of the movement in which only black people are allowed to participate. “Please note that BLM Philly is a Black only space,” claims the event description. Some people supporting the movement but who happen to not be black have requested an explanation from the group. “Is...

There’s a popular quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, where one character asks another character how he went bankrupt. The response is “Gradually and then suddenly.” It’s funny because it is true. The great upheavals in human affairs seldom happen without warning. They are always part of a long process that was plain to see, but people preferred not to notice it so it rolled along until a crash or revolution. A generation or two from now, people will look back at America and wonder how racial conflict broke out after what many thought were years of social progress....

For some descendants of persons held in U.S. chattel bondage, no monetary sum can compensate for the enslavement of their ancestors. However, for those looking for a number, there are various ways to calculate the value of involuntary servitude. Here’s one of them. Calculating Reparations: $1.5 Million for Each Slave Descendant in the U.S. by Denis Rancourt This article previously appeared on Mr. Rancourt’s web site, Activist Teacher. “This calculation includes only the money due to ancestors and their descendants, in terms of the stolen actual labor counted in person-hours.” It is not difficult to calculate a MINIMUM amount of...

Princeton economics professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton has been running around making an extraordinary claim: “Being really poor in America is in some ways worse than being really poor in India or Africa," he recently told the National Association for Business Economics. Asked about those comments in an interview with the Atlantic, Deaton doubled down: "If you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I'm not sure who would have the better life." This claim was qualified—Deaton is...

A panel of black political commentators on CNN imploded Thursday into a screaming match as they discussed the effect of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts could have on the black community. As the panel discussed the cuts, Paris Dennard, a Trump supporter, pointed out that HBCUs, the acronym for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, were not included in the list of proposed cuts. But host Don Lemon found the HBCU argument to be less important than other social programs. “So a lot of people say HBCUs are important,” Lemon declared, “but there are a lot of people watching here...

An image has been circulating around the Internet listing “10 Ways You Can Actively Reject Your White Privilege.” Take a read, because this is really instructive. The first thing that struck me about these rules are that the white people who comply with it most fully are: the resurgent racists of the “alt-right.” Rule 1? The alt-right usually take up minimal space at anti-racism rallies—the most minimal space possible. Rule 2? They’re not likely to live in “gentrified” upper-middle-class city neighborhoods. Rules 4 and 5? They don’t care about the “diversity” of their organizations, they presumably don’t have black friends,...

Iowa Rep. Steve King said Monday that blacks and Hispanics "will be fighting each other" before overtaking whites in the US population. King, a Republican, was on the radio responding to a question about Univision anchor Jorge Ramos' comment to Tucker Carlson on Fox News that whites would become a majority-minority demographic in America by 2044, a point Ramos used to make the argument that it is a multiracial country. "Jorge Ramos' stock in trade is identifying and trying to drive wedges between race," King told Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson on 1040 WHO. "Race and ethnicity, I should say...

There are so many ways to celebrate Black History Month online, but dressing up as legendary black women might take the cake. That's what kindergartner Lola is doing this February with the help of her mother and 28 legends that changed history. The two have created an adorable way to bring history lessons to life with a photo series they are sharing online. In January, Lola's mother, Cristi Smith-Jones, began having conversations with her daughter about slavery, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. "I saw that she really understood what we were saying, and was engaged, so...

At a time when the United States has plummeted in the global rankings of education standards, one of the country’s largest states is poised to scrap a test designed to measure the reading and writing skills of people trying to become teachers. Citing the fact that an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing the test, members of the New York state Board of Regents plans to adopt a task force's recommendation to eliminate the literacy exam, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, given to prospective teachers. The move to do away with the test has been...

Prospective teachers in New York will likely no longer have to pass a basic reading and writing literacy exam, the Associated Press is reporting. The state’s Board of Regents is expected to ditch the Academic Literacy Skills Test in part because black and Hispanic teaching candidates struggled to pass the exam, according to the AP.

With a new movie about King Kong coming out, a whole segment on NPR was devoted to proving that the fictional King Kong monster is actually a commentary on black people. The show interviewed Robin Means Coleman, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Michigan who specializes in studying King Kong. Yes, you read that right: a professor of Afro-American studies whose specialty is ... King Kong. [Snip] This is ridiculous. Yes, in the past, some racists have compared blacks to monkeys. But that does not mean that all portrayals of monkeys are about black people. In...

Is that what we’re calling it now? Let’s see if I have this straight. When men and women and children were kidnapped from their villages and separated from their families and packed into rickety ships for months at a time to be traded for tobacco and cotton and cloth and grain, that was immigration? When people were branded with hot irons like cattle on a ranch so that ownership of one human being by another human being would not be in dispute, that was immigration? When women were raped for no other reason than that it was Tuesday, or Friday...

President Jacob Zumahas called on parliament to change South Africa’s constitution to allow the expropriation of white owned land without compensation. Mr Zuma, 74, who made the remarks in a speech yesterday/FRI morning, said he wanted to establish a “pre-colonial land audit of land use and occupation patterns” before changing the law. “We need to accept the reality that those who are in parliament where laws are made, particularly the black parties, should unite because we need a two-thirds majority to effect changes in the constitution,” he said. Mr Zuma, who has lurched from one scandal to another since being...

As a black femme living under the United States’ first Orange administration, every piece of “breaking news” makes me feel like I’m living in Groundhog Day. You know, that movie with Bill Murray? Yeah, that one. Not a day goes by when you wake up in the morning and don’t hear that the Orange has done something despotic, or someone from his team has been caught in coitus with Russia (again). White liberals talk trash about resisting. They don’t resist. They congratulate Trump for doing something normal. Rinse, repeat. This pattern was compounded Tuesday night when he gave his first...

Many of us keep asking ourselves why the Black community in America hasn’t made more social and economic progress. Sure, we’ve made individual progress, but as a Black group, we’re really struggling. This isn’t some academic exercise, this is real. By any and every measurement that you want to examine (i.e. wealth, ownership, business rates, marriages, health, incarceration, education attainment, etc.) we are in serious decline, and the decline is moving faster in the negative. If our community was an airplane, we would be falling fast out of the air and near a great crash on the ground that would...

New York (CNN)A former reporter who was fired for fabricating sources was arrested Friday and accused of making some of the bomb threats against Jewish institutions that have so rattled Jews recently.... ...Juan Thompson, 31, was charged with one count of cyber-stalking for making at least eight threats as part of an attempt to intimidate a particular person after their romantic relationship ended, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges Thompson had emailed and phoned in threats to the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish institutions. Some of those threats mentioned a...