Free Republic

Marijuana legalization has a new, influential advocate: the New York Times. ................................................... We can’t always heal injury, but we can acknowledge and compensate for it. Any plan for legalization should come with a plan for reparations for those communities most damaged by our misguided war on marijuana. That doesn’t mean individual payments—the logistics are too difficult—as much as it does policies for affected communities, from job training and educational services to something like My Brother’s Keeper, all funded by a surtax on marijuana sales and distribution.

UPDATED: The Afro-Swedish national association has reported Swedish politician Eva Sidekrans to the police for selling chocolate balls labelled as "old fashioned unprejudiced negro ball" saying it incites racial hatred. She has since apologized. Business woman and Moderate party politician Eva Sidekrans sparked controversy by selling the items with the label which was widely picked up by social media. "We have this morning lodged a police notification against her for a hate crime against an ethnic group," Zakaria Zouhir, chairperson of the Afro-Swedish national association told the TT news agency. Zouhir added that there is, at present, no discrimination law...

One time I was speaking at a local South Florida high school and explaining “wealth redistribution.” I used a football analogy, with the example of a team being ahead at halftime 28-7. However, when the team came back after halftime, the scoreboard read 21-14. I explained to the students that officials met in the press booth and decided to have equitable apportionment of touchdowns to make the game fairer. They believed the self-esteem of the other team was being adversely affected. When I asked the high school seniors if they agreed, they vehemently said no. They felt they’d earned their...

Earlier this month, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act was celebrated. During the act’s legislative debate, then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey, responding to predictions, promised, “I’ll eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.” I don’t know whether Humphrey got around to keeping his promise, but here’s my question: Is it within the capacity of black Americans to make it in this society without the special favors variously called racial preferences, quotas, affirmative action and race-sensitive policies? What might a “yes” answer to that question assume and imply about blacks? Likewise, what would a “no” answer assume and imply?...

I find it interesting that all of Texas' Most Wanted criminals are categorized as "White." Gotta boost those crime numbers!

Even in the bitterly fought primary battle between Mississippi senator Thad Cochran and his challenger, state senator Chris McDaniel, some of the radio ads that aired against McDaniel were considered especially incendiary. One charged that a McDaniel victory would set back “race relationships between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.” Another warned that his campaign was part of an attempt to “roll back the hand of time.” The political-action committee that aired the ads raised eyebrows from the outset.

Many American colleges and universities are in the thrall of “diversity,” but none more so than my institution, the University of Wisconsin. This spring, the university adopted a new plan that, according to Board of Regents policy, “[p]laces the mission of diversity at the center of institutional life so that it becomes a core organizing principle.” ......................................................... It calls for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.”

A star high school athlete in rural Marshalltown, Iowa has been suspended for three football games this fall because he posted a social media image of himself enthusiastically festooned from head to toe in white clothing during school spirit week. In the photo, he made the letter “W” with his hands — which in this case stands for white. “The actual school chose the colors that each grade would be wearing,” Cathy Van Staalduine explained. “Juniors wore white. So Blair, of course, being active in the school, dressed from head to toe in white.” She noted emphatically that the “W”...

Martin Luther King dreamed that one day his children would "be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." This week, the current head of the Justice Department said that "given the disparities that still afflict and divide us," that dream will have to wait. Eric Holder addressed an audience at Howard University Tuesday as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. After recounting the horrific struggles of the civil rights movement and heroic efforts of many who fought to extend those rights to all races,...

A federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday that the University of Texas can continue using race as a factor in undergraduate admissions as a way of promoting diversity on campus, the latest in an ongoing case that made it to the U.S. Supreme Court last year only to be sent back to lower courts for further review. In a 2-1 ruling, judges from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that barring the university from using race would ultimately lead to a less diverse student body in defiance of previous legal precedent that promoting diversity was an important part...

Attorney General Eric Holder once again played the race card -- this time on national television, in an interview on ABC's "This Week," claiming that he and President Obama have been targets of "a racial animus" by some of the administration's political opponents. "There's a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that's directed at me (and) directed at the president," said Holder. "You know, people talk about taking their country back. ... There's a certain racial component to this for some people. I don't think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some, there's...

Broadway’s Tupac Shakur musical “Holler if Ya Hear Me” won’t be heard after July 20, when the sales-challenged new show will close following several weeks of dire box office.

The Obama administration long ago cultivated a sense among its defenders that lingering American racism inspires most of its critics, but it was Obama’s supporters in the press who elevated the practice of accusing conservatives of racial animus to farcical virtuosity. It was Obama’s boosters in the liberal blogosphere, many of whom found microphones for their agitation on networks like MSNBC, who invented the art of detecting “dog whistle” racism. For those unfamiliar, this is the ability to decode supposed appeals to racial solidarity that only a professional can ascertain. While these coded claims are rarely perceived by their...

A San Diego-based clothing company has landed in hot water over a photo showing its T-shirts featuring the body of a monkey paired off with a customized hanger depicting the face of an African-American boy. The offensive image was shared on Twitter Wednesday, sparking indignation among users who lambasted the manufacturer, Just Add A Kid, for allowing this to happen. The clothing brand, which is owned by the company Thanks A Million, quickly went into damage control mode, responding on Twitter that the incident was the result of a misunderstanding

Two Broward County assistant public defenders were fired Tuesday for Facebook comments calling Palestinians "cockroaches" and "filthy swine." Bruce Raticoff and Gary Sheres both lost their jobs, as outrage built after the Sun Sentinel published an article including the Facebook comments a week ago, Public Defender Howard Finkelstein said. The remarks from the two mens' personal Facebook accounts last week were posted under an item about Palestinians allegedly celebrating the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teen boys. The killings were blamed on the Islamic militant group Hamas. "They are the filthy swine they don't eat. Their ignorance to the...

NPR’s education team sent out a curious tweet Wednesday that prompted an online backlash. “I reach out to diverse sources on deadline,” the tweet from @npr_ed said. “Only the white guys get back to me.” The tweet seemed uncharacteristic for NPR, an outlet that fired analyst Juan Williams after he made remarks about feeling “nervous” if he sees people dressed in “Muslim garb” on an airplane.Kamenetz said she had mistakenly sent the tweet from the NPR education account instead of her own and that she regretted it.

"New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional," writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book, "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable source. But many well-meaning people will regard his words as provocative and even dangerous. For they fatally undermine the idea, widely shared by so-called progressives, that any apparent differences between groups of people are the product of nurture rather than nature, of social conditioning rather...

(Based an actual encounter in an inner-city Trenton, NJ charter school). A poem.Keeper of Names By Steve Peacock Why do so many black students’ names end with “-quan” and “-asia,” the middle-aged white teacher inquires of the sole black educator in the break room. As I understand it, she replies humbly, (so as not to claim expertise on the matter), “quan,” like “DaeQuan,” has African roots. But what about “asia”? We’ve got Ta’Asia, Ti’Asia, Sequasia, Shyasia? I am truly unsure, she says. Still, he persists. There’s also Arquasia, Tintasia, and… I said I don’t know. Then there’s Quintasia, Sashasia… Oh...

‘New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable source. But many well-meaning people will regard his words as provocative and even dangerous. For they fatally undermine the idea, widely shared by so-called progressives, that any apparent differences between groups of people are the product of nurture rather than nature, of social conditioning rather...

The former police chief, James Sheppard, who is black, told the Democrat & Chronicle the immigrants will “eventually acclimate” to their new “harsh environment.” "Any time you have an immigrant group come in they stand out, particularly in your depressed neighborhoods," Sheppard said. "They may dress different, they may talk different, they tend not to fight back and so that just made them easy victims, easy to identify and the fact that they didn't call police that just made it happen more often."

An Arizona State University professor who was arrested by campus police last month is now accusing her arresting officer of using excessive force. CBS 5 News obtained video of the incident which occurred on May 20. The video depicts an altercation between campus police officer Stewart Ferrin and Arizona State assistant English professor Ersula Ore.

According to the work of Charles C. Johnson and Joel S. Gilbert, what we thought was just a racist campaign to get people out to vote in the Cochran vs McDaniel Mississippi Senate race was the tip of the iceberg. It now appears to be a vote buying scandal right out of the office of Thad Cochran himself: Reverend Stevie Fielder, associate pastor at historic First Union Missionary Baptist Church and former official at Meridian’s redevelopment agency, says he delivered “hundreds or even thousands,” of blacks to the polls after being offered money and being assured by a Cochran campaign...

As many as 10 people were shot Tuesday morning, killing two according to Miami police. Five people were taken to the hospital and two people died in the shooting outside an apartment building, Miami police spokeswoman Frederica Burden said. One of the victims was a teenage girl, CBS4 reported.

John has previously noted the problem of robberies at the University of Minnesota on its main campus in Minneapolis. The campus is near downtown in an urban setting. Following standard practice, the university issues crime alerts that identify the race of the perpetrator when the authorities have a basis to do so based on victim identification or otherwise. Some groups on campus are not happy with the crime alerts. The local CBS station reports: School officials at the University of Minnesota are working with black student and facility organizations after they wrote a letter to the school’s president about the...

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...

A remarkable thing happened in Cincinnati on Thursday. WKRC-TV, which has taken to calling itself “Local 12 [1],� did a story on the growing problem of black-on-white teen mob violence — and called it black-on-white teen mob violence.The event where the violence occurred took place two weeks earlier during Memorial Day weekend at the city’s Taste of Cincinnati event [2] downtown.As has been the case since even before the city’s 2001 race riots [3], the Cincinnati Enquirer, the town’s only daily newspaper, was late to the story with a woefully inadequate, truth-dodging dispatch [4].Reporter Adam Kiefaber spent the first...

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...

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade (Penguin Press, 288 pp., $27.95) In 2001, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial provocatively titled “Racial Profiling in Medical Research.” The author, Robert Schwartz, reiterated the commonly held view that no biological basis exists for race, and then argued that physicians should not consider race in their research or medical practice. This prompted a sharp response from geneticist Neil Risch, who pointed out that numerous studies had demonstrated significant genetic differences among humans based on continental ancestry, suggesting evidence of five distinct races. Among the reasons...

I have to apologize to the readers of American Thinker. Last week, I wrote about more than a dozen episodes of black mob violence around the country over the Memorial Day weekend. Turns out I was wrong: I missed at least three examples of large-scale racial violence. Or 300 depending on how you count. So let’s see if we can make up for these grievous errors of omission, starting in Chicago. Shortly after Memorial Day, cops and other readers of the Second City Cop blog in Chicago started reporting large groups of black people rampaging through the upscale Gold Coast...

Bender told investigators he was walking home when a group of black men in a red Pontiac car approached him. Bender, who is white, told police that the men in the car yelled several racial slurs at him before one of them shot him, according to the department news release.

How's this for irony ... V. Stiviano said a bunch of racist stuff about black people -- and TMZ Sports has the footage. Among the lowlights ... -- "I don't understand black people. You give them a little bit of money, they don't know what to do with it." -- "[Black people] just act crazy ... they're like, 'Yo, I wanna put extra rims on top of my rims. And my rims are gonna turn around. I'm gonna call them spinners.'" The footage was shot back in 2011 as part of a reality show pilot about gold diggers -- V....

Calling someone a "racist" used to mean that a person disliked certain people because of their skin color. Today, MOST OF THE TIME, it means something entirely different. Now, if someone is better and smarter than a liberal, a liberal cries "white privilege." If a liberal is failing and he doesn't know what to do about it, he yells "racism." If a liberal doesn't know how to counter your argument, he calls it "racist." If liberal can't counter your political argument, he screams out "bigot." So, if you're conservative, it's almost a backwards compliment at this point. "You're just...

Its’ quite a telling moment from the Gray Lady, spotted by Eugene Volokh of The Washington Post:  The New York Times Bits blog reports: Google on Wednesday released statistics on the makeup of its work force, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man’s world. But wait — just a few paragraphs down, the post notes that non-Hispanic whites are 61 percent of the Google work force, slightly below the national average. (That average, according to 2006-10 numbers, is 67 percent.) Google is thus less white than the typical American company.The New York Times is joining Apartheid-era South Africa...

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...

On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger killed seven people. Three were stabbed and four were shot to death. The left wasted no time in laying the blame. A white man. Being white is bordering on being criminal in this country. "White privilege" is akin to original sin. Let's have a look at how the disease that is liberalism treated the murders. Kos:Yes, Elliot Rodger is White: What the Santa Barbara Shooter Can Teach Us About Race and Masculinity Elliot Rodger was/is a white man. For some people, this fact is very controversial and upsetting. As I wrote in 'The True...

Have you noticed all the talk about so-called white privilege over the last couple months? All of a sudden, out of nowhere, white privilege has become the latest cause for the progressive left. Our moral betters on the left are telling white people to “check your privilege.” All this phrase really means is shut up and go away. The whole point of telling people to check their privilege is to stifle debate and silence criticism of progressive race baiting. This includes Jewish Holocaust survivors, who were told by faux intellectual Toure Neblett to “check their privilege.” Apparently in Neblett’s world...

Donald Sterling is arguing that the NBA has no right to take the Los Angeles Clippers away from him in his response to the league, even as his estranged wife says he has authorized her to sell the franchise...

Hours after Floyd "Money" Mayweather Jr. and T.I. squared off over the rapper's wife ... Floyd sent a not so subtle message to T.I. ... "These hos ain't loyal."

Yes, certain subjects are off limits. Just ask Mark Cuban. Eric Holder famously suggested that, on the question of race at least, America represents a “nation of cowards.” After watching the crucifixion of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban over the past couple of days, it’s nigh on impossible not to think that he’s right. In an interview arranged by the business magazine Inc., Cuban went out on a limb. Answering a question about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, he started by reiterating his view that not only is cultural censorship a force for ill, but that it is impossible...

Let's say tha someone owned a chain of hotels (be they whatever number of stars), and this individual was caught on tape uttering a string of racial expletives. Let's say furthermore that this individual had signed a contract that if they were to ever bring harm to the company or impugn its name, that within the contract clause for owners this individual could be forced to sell. That I could see and understand. But let's say that this individual sold his string of fancy hotels, and later wanted to rent a room in a hotel that was far away from...

  Every conservative should consider the profound and possibly awful observation made by the New York Times’ Josh Barro (italics added): The rush to stand with Mr. Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest incarnation of conservative antigovernment messaging. And nonwhites are not interested, because a gut-level aversion to the government is almost exclusively a white phenomenon. If there were validity to Barro’s observation, then any anti-government political philosophy (that wished to survive) would seek to reduce immigration. After all, America is rapidly importing economically poor, poorly educated, low-skilled immigrants.  Those immigrants generate racial inequalities, and inequality...

Afeni Shakur delivered the good word to Sybrina Fulton—mother of slain teen Trayvon Martin—and other moms who've lost children to violence on Saturday (May 17), at the Trayvon Martin Foundation's Circle of Mothers retreat in Miami. In her emotional keynote address, Shakur, who famously lost her son Tupac in 1996, pleaded with the audience to release anger and instead honor the deceased with acts of positivity and community uplifting....

n late April, the Institute for Economics and Peace released their 2012 edition of the "United States Peace Index (USPI)." This comprehensive report ranks the 50 states and determines which are the most peaceful and which are the least peaceful. Maine is the most peaceful state with a Peace Index score of 1.31. Louisiana is the least peaceful with a score of 4.05. Michigan is ranked 29th with a score of 2.69. You can see the full rankings here. A first glance at the Peace Index would appear to suggest that blue states are the most peaceful and that red...

Barricades were put up along South Beach Thursday, as the city of Miami Beach gets ready to host Urban Beach Week. Kiarra Wells and her three friends flew down from Detroit for the annual extravaganza, and Wells said she's just happy to hit warmer weather.

On any given day of the week, one can turn on the liberal media and hear how the Democratic Party is the one party that cares for black Americans. Liberal pundits such as Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, and of course Al Sharpton are forever fighting the purportedly racist Republicans on behalf of black Americans. Just a few weeks ago, Nancy Pelosi told Americans that Republicans were trying to take food out the mouths of black Americans by cutting food stamps. She then stated that 50% of food stamp recipients are black Americans. And let us not forget that the Democrats...

The Greenville County Sheriff's Office is asking for assistance identifying a person they said was involved in an armed robbery....

Speaking about the Donald Sterling scandal with the Clippers, and how the country has evolved in terms of race relations, Cuban touched on a hot topic when he said, 'We’re all prejudice in one way or another. If I see a black kid in a hoodie, and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street.' ...."In hindsight I should have used different examples. I didn't consider the Trayvon Martin family, and I apologize to them for that. Beyond apologizing to the Martin family, I stand by the words and the substance of the interview,"

A pro-life legal group is having to go to court to help the state of Arizona protect its law it passed to ban race-based abortions. Here’s the ironic rub: the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the bill, which stops abortions done specifically if the baby is African-American (or any other specific race or gender). It makes one wonder if the NAACP, which, for years has held a pro-abortion position and which recently won a court order to silence a black pro-life who was writing at LifeNews to expose it’s abortion advocacy, should be called the National Association for the Abortion...

No Whites Allowed: Student Booted From Conference Because Of Skin Color: “Because I was white they would feel unsafe?” Mac Slavo May 20th, 2014 Earlier this week First Lady Michelle Obama urged schoolchildren to monitor their parents for racially insensitive comments because Federal laws can only go so far in stopping racism. While we don’t have any racially insensitive incidents against African Americans to report at this time, maybe Mrs. Obama can assist us with the insensitive and racist actions taken by organizers of the annual White Privilege Conference held in Madison, Wisconsin. According to Progressives Today, when a white...

I am at a loss to understand what constructive purpose first lady Michelle Obama (and Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others) hopes to achieve by constantly talking about the race issue. Last Friday, Michelle Obama chose to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling -- in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional -- by reminding graduating high-school seniors in Topeka, Kansas, that racism is still alive and well in America today. Mrs. Obama said: "No matter what...