Racism

Hip-hop millionaire Russell Simmons and MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan aren't only outspoken supporters of the Occupy movement. On the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the pair published an article at the Huffington Post claiming that our decades-old war on drugs is a racist conspiracy designed to unfairly incarcerate blacks to profit government agencies and corporate America:

Well, she’s certainly making a case for the title. In a piece titled, When white people lack “bourgeois values”, the Salon Editor at Large manages a race and class-baiting exacta, covering an alleged economic disdain shown by Republicans towards African-Americans, and charging the GOP with promoting policies which “shackle women to the home”. In attacking a Rick Santorum speech on family…

After Mitt Romney’s comfortable win in the New Hampshire Republican primaries Tuesday, media attention shifts to the next primary, in socially conservative South Carolina, which New York Times campaign reporter Jim Rutenberg claims is “a place famous for surfacing the dark undercurrents of American politics” in his Wednesday front-page story, “In South Carolina, Challenges Await on Ideology and…

Star Wars creator George Lucas said Monday that Hollywood studios refused to back his new film Red Tails - about World War II's Tuskegee Airmen - because the cast was all black. This was told to a rather stunned Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's Daily Show (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, perhaps prodded by criticism from Bernard Goldberg on The O’Reilly Factor Thursday night, posted an update Friday afternoon to his Tuesday blog post offensively accusing House Speaker John Boehner of racism for asking Obama to delay for one night an address to Congress last September. Unrepentant, Rosenthal berated some of his critics for…

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, Politico's Evan Thomas - formerly of Newsweek - made claims about the existence of "angry, white, middle class" men in the Republican Party who are "seething." And fellow panel member and Washington Post columnist Colby King accused GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum of "pandering" to a racist view "that black people are…

On the campaign trail, Republican candidate Rick Santorum blurted out a word that sounded like "black" and was widely-criticized for making a generalization that black citizens rely on welfare. Though the transcript of the remark is not entirely certain, CNN's Anderson Cooper emphasized the comment anyway with a "Keeping Them Honest" report on his Thursday show. The title "Keeping Them…

CBS's Early Show repeatedly hit GOP candidate Newt Gingrich on Friday over his comments on African-Americans and food stamps. The network played the quote for African-American Congressman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and engaged Gingrich over the context, even accusing him of trying to start a class war. "You've accused President Obama of trying to start a class war," co-host Nancy Cordes told…

While various liberal media outlets have been busy trying to smear former senator Rick Santorum as a racist for supposedly saying, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money," at a campaign event, other intellectually honest liberals have rendered a different verdict. One of them, Mediaite writer Tommy Christopher, noted today how "Young Turks" co-…

Determined to vet up-and-coming GOP candidate Rick Santorum, CNN's Gary Tuchmann chose Wednesday to pull a number of liberal attacks on the candidate's social beliefs and call it a report. Apparently for CNN, "scrutiny" entails digging up liberal talking points instead of studying a candidate's voting record and economic and foreign policy plans. Tuchman attested on Anderson Cooper 360 that…

Is House Speaker John Boehner an anti-Obama racist? Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal all but accuses him in his Tuesday blog from Des Moines, “Nobody Likes to Talk About It, but It’s There.” (The web headline is blunter: “Republican Attacks Have Racist Undertones.”) Actually, Rosenthal is all too happy to talk about racist Republicans if it helps Democrats politically, as he did on…

At the same time that the nation's leading networks can't call Obama a "liberal" more than about once a year, NPR's religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty on Monday announced Rick Santorum was "very, very conservative" on the social issues, in addition to being "very pro-life." He even -- horrors! -- home-schools his seven children. "He's Catholic. He's billed himself very much as the…

On Tuesday's The Daily Show on Comedy Central, as he recounted the racist newsletters that were published in the 1990s under the name of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, host Jon Stewart mocked other GOP candidates after clips of them attacking Paul for not taking seriously the threat of a nuclear Iran, suggesting that the candidates were not so concerned about racism. (Video below)…

During MSNBC coverage of the Republican Party Iowa caucuses on Tuesday, shortly after 8:30 p.m, MSNBC's Chris Matthews lumped "neocons" and the socially conservative Moral Majority movement in with segregationist Dixiecrats as he asserted that Republicans had picked up the "droppings" and the "effluent" of the Democratic Party, causing the Republican Party to be too "junk laden" to open their…