Race Issues

A white police officer shoots and kills an unarmed black teen who fit the description of an earlier cell phone shoplifting incident. The African-American community responds in outrage and protests while the boy’s body lies on the ground for hours. The cop insists it was self-defense. Sound familiar? This was the plot on last night’s episode of Scandal where a real-life murder case was turned into…

When it comes to right-wingers and the Affordable Care Act, biology and race are destiny. That’s the word from lefty pundit Marcotte, who argued in a Thursday column for Talking Points Memo that the “fight against Obamacare has been about needling the gender- and race-based resentments of the conservative base.”

He's at it again. On his March 5 Hardball program in a segment with Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) about the 50th anniversary of the Selma march for voting rights, Hardball host Chris Matthews slammed as racially-motived GOP efforts for establishing voter ID laws. 

Leave it to a writer at Mother Jones to dispense condescending healthy eating advice while serving up a side dish of alleged historical racism with a tincture of capitalism bashing. Kiera Butler, a senior editor there, didn't have to engage in either exercise to make her nutritional points, which may have some validity. She must have felt that her primary headline ("Why You Should Stop Eating…

Say "1964," and those of us old enough might think of the appearance on Ed Sullivan's show of some little British group called the Beatles. But Chris Matthews recalls something else: the Republican party's decision to nominate Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, and his ensuing wipeout by LBJ. On his MSNBC show tonight, Matthews suggested that Republicans are in a similarly reckless mood, and…

The writer-at-large for New York magazine identifies Carson as the latest of the Republican party’s three “Great Black Presidential Hopes,” but argues that Carson is more significant than Alan Keyes or Herman Cain because he’d be running “in the context of both restrictive voting laws and the retro civil-rights jurisprudence of the John Roberts” Supreme Court. Rich also claims that “Carson lends…

While it's performing a long overdue housecleaning, MSNBC should point its broom in Melissa Harris-Perry's direction and sweep her off the network for her anti-democratic, violence-advocating rant earlier this week at Cornell University. Among other things, Harris-Perry told her audience that George Zimmerman deserved whatever injuries he received at the hands of Trayvon Martin in the violent…

In an almost completely expected decision, the Department of Justice yesterday announced that it "found insufficient evidence to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012." In reporting on the announcement, Jennifer Kay and Eric Tucker at the Associated Press were predictably selective in recounting the details…

Oh, Hollywood, you're racist and you don't even know it! That was the undercurrent of post-Oscars analysis delivered by Chris Hayes and panelists on the Monday, February 23 edition of All In. From emcee Neil Patrick Harris's opening joke to a running bit with Octavia Spencer to Sean Penn's "green card" joke, the faculty-lounge lefties assembled on set lectured the Academy Awards for being too…

On Monday, Eriq Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter spotlighted how the National Association of African-American Owned Media filed a lawsuit against Comcast and Time Warner Cable which seeks "at least $20 billion in damages from the way the two giants allegedly discriminate against black-owned media." The lawsuit also alleges that Comcast "made large cash 'donations'" to Al Sharpton and his…

In a discussion with plenty of other objectionable elements on Sean Hannity's Fox News show Friday, Juan Williams asserted that "There's no question that if you look at our Constitution, there are elements of racism right in it." Note his use of the present tense. The version of this country's founding document Williams was referencing must be 147 or more years old, because the only element of…

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine put this on the cover: “Teaching Ferguson: How Professors Are Using Racial Flashpoints in the Classroom.” Yes, “[Trayvon] Martin, Ferguson and their galvanizing ripple effects have inspired universities across the country to incorporate racially charged tragedies into their curricula, sometimes in novel ways.” Some of the course work listed could be bringing…

Here is Joe Scarborough, a guy who blithely plays the co-host of a morning show on a network that has a god-awful record for living in the sewers of racial politics. This is the network that gives the possibly-soon-to-be-removed-to-the weekend lineup Al Sharpton an entire show. But Joe is concerned about Rudy Giuliani - a guy whose political heroes include those vociferous racists Robert Kennedy…

Earlier today, Thaddeus Murphy was charged in U.S. District Court in Colorado in connection with an attempted January bombing in Colorado Springs. The targeted building houses that city's chapter of the NAACP, a barber shop — and, apparently at one time, a tax accountant's office. Quite a few people leaped to the conclusion that the bomb had to be meant for the NAACP, even though, as syndicated…