Nation Topics - Racism and Discrimination
Activists challenging Walker administration assaults on public education and on college students from immigrant families disrupt Wisconsin legislative hearing with a reading from the Declaration of Independence.
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Herman Cain’s candidacy is a cautionary tale against the simplistic racial reasoning that has dominated American political discourse.
Arizona's notorious anti-immigrant crusader is about to become the first State Senate president in US history to be recalled.
Why my disagreement with Cornel West about Obama's presidency generated so much excitement.
Major League Baseball's Civil Rights Game was turned inside out by musician Carlos Santana, who refused to be silent.
As a black man, Obama's confident knowledge of his lineage is precisely the thing that makes his American identity dubious.
Donald Trump crossed a new line by questioning Barack Obama's educational credentials this week, a classic race-baiting trick in the GOP playbook.
What makes it so lethal is that it has broad appeal—from the far left to the far right.
An American MA student, of Pakistani descent, was flagged by a Southwest Airlines crew member as “suspicious” and kicked off the plane, all for saying "I've got to go."
The Cross of Redemption tells the story of James Baldwin as a working writer: casual, lax and preachy, but also honest, angry and brilliant.
Presents the author's views on how world leaders, political issues and news events of the day are often compared the leaders, issues, and events of the past. Review of comments made by Senator Dick Durbin comparing the Guantánamo Bay prison facilities to Nazi detention camps and Stalinist gulags; Analysis of the criticisms made regarding the American facilities in Guantánamo Bay made by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights; Discussion of the case of former Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen links current and past issues in American politics and society; View that Americans and American politicians need to better understand their own fear and the ethical dilemma's inherent in the global war on terrorism.
The article provides information on the book "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution," by Diane McWhorter. Thirty-eight years after the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, two of the four principals are dead, but the issues are still full of life. Thomas Blanton Jr. is one of two surviving Klan bombers, and after a jury convicted him in early May of murdering the four black girls that Sunday morning, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley accused the U.S. federal Bureau of Investigation of concealing evidence and aiding the Ku Klux Klan for decades after the event. The book includes the most detailed account ever of the Birmingham Movement's strategy and tactics, but what makes it unique is its account of the local opposition to civil rights, and particularly the links between the "Big Mules," who ran Birmingham's industrial economy, and the Klan bombers.
The film "Black and White," by James Yoback is open and waiting to be explored. White teenagers from a Manhattan prep school, led by skinny, squeaky-voiced Charlie, delve into Harlem and the funkier sections of Staten Island, meanwhile trying on African-American identities for size. The other film "Me, Myself I," written and directed by Pip Karmel is an alternate life story, in which an Australian journalist who's unhappily marking her 30th birthday discovers what she might have become, if only she'd accepted that long-ago marriage proposal from Mr. Right. The other film "East Is East," is the directorial debut of Damien O'Donnell, who has done a fine job of opening up the play of the same title by Ayub Khan-Din.
The article presents information on two books: American Militias: Rebellion, Racism & Religion, by Richard Abanes; The Klan, by Patsy Sims. Most of the new books on the militia movement build the case for a government crackdown and new anti-paramilitary legislation. Even though Abanes lends his adversaries credibility by buying into their terminology, American Militias is an informative primer. He provides concise, competent accounts of the patriot movement's origins and rise. The militias have been capturing the white American mainstream in a way that no radical right movement has since the Klan of the twenties. Patsy Sims's classic 1978 study of the revitalized Invisible Empire, The Klan, has just been re-issued. Each chapter in Sims's tour across the South interviewing and investigating top Klansmen is briefly updated.
When the author read that the Ku Klux Klan planned to hold a rally in his hometown, he felt an odd sense of shock, of personal affront, even though he did long ago left the town and grown away from it. As it happened, the author had planned to be in Crawfordsville on the weekend of the rally, which was scheduled for the Saturday before Easter. From loudspeakers at the far end of the block came the blare of country music. The redneck anthem was visually echoed by Confederate flags on the courthouse steps, not twenty feet from the Civil War monument.
The U.S. is in the throes of high political debate reminiscent of the anti-immigrant furor stirred up by the Know-Nothing movement before the Civil War and the xenophobic propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Images of the bombed World Trade Center and of shivering Chinese from the Golden Venture, run aground off New York, have dominated the debate. The Administration's bill on asylum should be amended to provide sufficient safeguards to insure that genuine refugees have a fair opportunity to receive protection.
The article focuses on the book "Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews," by Jack Nelson. When Mississippi entered the Union in 1817 there were already a hundred Jews in the state, mainly German Jewish immigrants who had drifted southward from Cincinnati and Louisville, west from Montgomery or upriver from New Orleans, all attracted by high cotton prices, cheap bottom land, the heavy river traffic and the availability of slaves. Approximately 1,500 Jews fought for the Confederacy, yet after Appomattox many of them worked with the so-called carpetbaggers and the new Black Reconstruction government.
This article presents information on the book "Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s," by Kathleen M. Blee. Kathleen Blee's superb new book on women in the 1920s. Ku Klux Klan explains with terrifying banality how easily white women have slid into racist politics in the past, and how deep white supremacy lurks in the U.S. women's history. What is so chilling about iflee's story is that those women did not join just to serve as obeisant handmaidens to their male masters. Blee's study shatters any vestigial notions one might hold that politics sorts out into a tidy spectrum with feminists, anti-racists and socialists arrayed on one side and sexists, white supremacists and capitalists on the other.
Presents the poems "Black and White," and "At the Station," by Nicholas Christopher.
Presents several editorials which discuss different subjects. "A Losing Game Plan," which discussed the political and economic conditions in the U.S.; "Computer Dragnet," which discussed the orders of attorney William French Smith on the compilation of a list of prospective criminals in the U.S.; "Greensboro Rerun," which discussed the broadcast of the massacre of five Communist Worker Party demonstrators by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
