Free Republic

The black senator who could challenge Hillary By Alex Massie in Washington (Filed: 06/10/2006) A black senator with only two years in office has emerged as the outstanding star of the Democrats' campaign for next month's mid-term elections. Senator Barack Obama is bringing hope to Democrats Kenyan-born Barack Obama, 45, is already being touted as a challenger to Hillary Clinton for the party's presidential nomination. Another scenario sees him as Mrs Clinton's running mate, raising the possibility of a first female president and first black vice-president in one fell swoop in 2008. Mr Obama is disproving the adage that Washington...

The current issue of Time magazine has a dubious article on "Learning While Black." The teaser reads: "You've heard of racial profiling on the roads and in the skies. But are minority kids also being unfairly singled out for discipline in schools?" The article is not completely one-sided, but the unmistakable gist of it is that the answer to the question posed is, "Probably so." But neither the anecdotal evidence nor the statistics cited are at all persuasive. The story begins and ends with the story of a student for whom we are supposed to feel some sympathy, but...

Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, by Bruce Bartlett (Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pp., $26.95) Two years ago, on his Daily Kos website, Markos Moulitsas asked: “Is it any wonder the GOP is the party of racists?” While Moulitsas conceded that “not every Republican is a racist,” he maintained that “the opposite—every racist is a Republican—is just about right.” Such sentiments typify a common view that racism is the soul of the Republican Party, and that black Republicans are traitors to their race, or at least peculiar. Bruce Bartlett sets the record straight in Wrong on Race: The Democratic...

There is a play running at a small theatre in Philadelphia right now where one of the main characters is based on, of all people, me. It is neither about nor aimed at Black History Month -- but it has major implications for how we should celebrate it. The play is called A House with No Walls, and there are two things about it that have given me immense pleasure. One is that the character glides around the stage making speeches full of passages drawn straight from my writing on race. No author could help but eat this up. The...

A letter to the Republican Party: All that talk a year ago about the new black ascendancy in the Republican Party, with profiles all over the place of Michael Steele, Ken Blackwell, and Lynn Swann ... and in the end, not one of them was elected. If your party was hoping they would usher more black voters into pulling the lever for you, you were neglecting something crucial. Millions of black people remain convinced that the R in Republican stands for racist, for a reason you will have to attend to if you're serious about the black vote. I am...

The Talk Shows Sunday, January 15th, 2006 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Reps. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., John Boehner, R-Ohio, and John Shadegg, R-Ariz., candidates in the upcoming House majority leader race; Harry Johnson, president, Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation. MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Paul Bremer, former U.S. administrator in Iraq; Taylor Branch, civil rights author and historian; Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow John McWhorter; Children's Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman. FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and...

As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America. The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now. The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black....

John McWhorter is right to say that we ought to pause and remember the Watts riots of 40 years ago and ponder their implication for America's present and future ["Burned, Baby, Burned..." FR post here]. I take strong issue, however, with the conclusions he draws from his review of the events in Watts and South Central Los Angeles in 1965. I think the difference between McWhorter and me arises in large measure from our profoundly different perspectives on the event. He writes that he was born two months after the riots occurred and that his conclusions are based on his...

WHEN I was growing up in the 70's, Ebony and Jet were always on the coffee table, along with the late, great Ebony Jr. for children. There always seemed to be a party going on in all three of them, which is just the way their creator John H. Johnson wanted it. He created Ebony in 1945 to show that "Negroes got married, had beauty contests, gave parties, ran successful businesses, and did all the other normal things of life." Ebony was still at it 60 years later when Mr. Johnson died this week - its 717th issue is on...

<p>So much for polls that had President Bush getting twice as many black votes as he did in 2000. In 2000 he got 8 percent of the black vote. This time, he got only 11 percent. Eighty-eight percent of the black vote went to John Kerry.</p>

Not African-American It's time we descendants of slaves brought to the United States let go of the term "African-American" and go back to calling ourselves Black -- with a capital B. Modern America is home now to millions of immigrants who were born in Africa. Their cultures and identities are split between Africa and the United States. They have last names like Onwughalu, Nwangwu and Senkofa. They speak languages like Wolof, Twi, Yoruba and Hausa, and speak English with an accent. They were raised on African cuisine, music, dance and dress styles, customs and family dynamics. Their children often...

Dignity is all a black person in America has,” Harvard professor Cornel West solemnly told listeners during the kick-off episode of black pundit Tavis Smiley’s new NPR radio show. Just then, West was feeling bereft of his dignity, after a much-publicized meeting with new Harvard president Lawrence Summers. West’s new boss had questioned the worth of some of his celebrity prof’s recent career moves—writing and editing several lightweight non-academic books, recording a rap CD, and assisting Al Sharpton on his presidential bid. Perhaps, Summers suggested, it might be time to get back to serious scholarly work. West quickly ran to...

COMMENTARY Why should Bush speak to a hostile group that has outlived its usefulness? Last week, for the fourth year in a row, President Bush declined the NAACP's invitation to speak at its annual convention. Predictably, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume railed that the Bush administration failed to recognize the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group as being significant or important in any way. The sad thing is, the Bush administration's attitude toward the group is justified. The NAACP is stuck in a mind-set that worked 30 years ago but makes little sense today. Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond...

What more do you people want?" strikes most black Americans as a naive question. After all, the abuse of racial profiling remains one of the nation's most serious problems (although some profiling will remain necessary in troubled communities to protect their own residents from harm). Racial discrepancies, subtle but decisive, persist in areas such as bank lending and healthcare. Black men are tragically overrepresented in the prison population. Yet these remnants of pre-Civil Rights Act America hardly constitute the "reign of white supremacy" that some blacks still decry. The United States now has a lower percentage of black families living...

Dr. John H. McWhorter...was on FoxNews this afternoon speaking about Micheal Jackson. A fine interview, McWhorter detailed the failed individual responsibility of Jackson, commenting that he was as white as modern cosmetic surgery could make him...also that the alledged connections to the Nation of Islam cannot help Jackson in the least and will actually hurt him. He also said Jackson needs to step up and start being a real person again... I have seen other interviews given by McWhorter. He always speaks with astonishing clarity and has an insite into the modern social-race issues that is always right on the...

<p>The spelling of Jayson Blair's first name suggests that he is black. Seeing the name when I read an article about the first indications that he had been fabricating stories for the New York Times, a chill went up my spine. What worried me was not that a black person had been screwing up. We can expect that black people, as human beings, will have their bad days like anyone else. But I imagined one direction the fracas might go: that Jayson just might "spin" the story into a tale of discrimination.</p>

How Losing the Race Changed My Life by Darryn "Dutch" Martin As one of her six children, the greatest gift I received from my dear, now-departed mother was an appreciation of the value of an education. This appreciation helped me rise from our poor surroundings in inner city Cleveland to become the successful black professional that I am today. Heeding this lesson, however, was also the genesis of years of verbal abuse, ostracism and criticism I was forced to endure from other black people - from elementary school through graduate school. During these years, I was accused by my black...

<p>John H. McWhorter, writing on "How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back"</p>

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor. Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy “black community” here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food...

Internal ConstraintsJohn McWhorter, author of the controversial Losing the Race, on what's really holding African Americans back. Interviewed by Cathy Young and Michael W. Lynch Few nonfiction books have had as immediate an impact on public debate as John H. McWhorter's Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. Published last year by The Free Press, McWhorter's volume on race relations has won raves ("the importance of...Losing the Race is difficult to overstate" said the Weekly Standard) and attacks ("analytically weak...[and] irresponsible" said Harvard Law School's Randall L. Kennedy). Whatever one's opinion of it, Losing the Race has become one of...