By Jamilah King, Colorlines “Back in 2010 the NAACP called the racial discrepancy in weed arrests a ‘civil rights issue.’ One year later, to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. War on Drugs, author Michelle Alexander told a crowd of 1,000 at Harlem’s Riverside Church back in 2011, ‘The enemy…
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By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic “Our notion of what constitutes ‘white’ and what constitutes ‘black’ is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a ‘Southern race’ and not see the Civil War, the creation of an ‘Irish race’ and not think of Cromwell’s…
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Can A White Guy Represent For His People? By Channing Kennedy, Code Switch “In my 32 years as a white person, I’ve self-identified (at various points) as a Midwesterner, a feminist, a nerd, a poor person, a redneck, a queer ally, an atheist, a punk, a Unitarian, a college dropout, a…
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Actually, Jason Collins Isn’t the First Openly Gay Man in a Major Pro Sport By Allen Barra, The Atlantic “A few months back, the Baltimore Ravens’ Brendon Ayanbadejo, an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights, told USA Today that he thought the first player in the three major sports to out…
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‘Yo’ Said What? By Rebecca Hersher, Code Switch ‘Yo’ Said What? By Rebecca Hersher, Code Switch “Over the past few decades, we’ve made a lot of changes in the English language to make it more gender neutral. We say ‘police officer’ instead of ‘policeman,’ and ‘people’ instead of ‘mankind.’ But there’s one…
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By Andrew Rosenthal, New York Times Taking Note Blog “The argument that we should treat Mr. Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant boils down to his religion and his ethnic origin. This is the kind of logic that led the United States to imprison Japanese-Americans during World War 2, and to…
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By Seth Freed-Wessler, Colorlines “In the end, the bill retains all the trappings of American public policy’s manic relationship to citizenship and migration: the country embraces some and despises others, thinks some immigrants are good immigrants and other immigrants are bad. Perhaps this is a given, but to…
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By Julianne Hing, Colorlines “The Justice Department cannot station a monitor inside every classroom or along every school hallway. And that’s what some people in Meridian fear, that the federal government’s reach may end just at the moment that the town requires the most handholding. ‘Mississippi is…
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Wedding Bells Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker “A decade later, it’s clear that Scalia was right. Once a society decides that the law must treat a group of people equally in one area of life, it becomes harder—and, eventually, impossible—to justify discriminating against them in others. If gay people can’t…
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By Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica “‘There were people in my class with lower grades who weren’t in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin,’ she says. ‘I was taught from the time I…
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