Marc Lamont Hill doubled down on his theory about supposed white supremacy shaping police encounters with black people. During a segment on Wednesday's CNN Tonight, Hill disputed the Supreme Court's decades-old "objectively reasonable" standard on the use of police force, and emphasized that "everyday citizens have biases....oftentimes, we are shaped by white supremacy. We are shaped by fear of black bodies. So, just because a jury of people have (sic) the same irrational white supremacist fear of black people doesn't mean that it's okay to shoot them."
Race Issues
By Dylan Gwinn | November 5, 2015 | 10:42 AM EST
Filed under the heading of, “You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” I give you Terry Rambler, who is the Chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona. Rambler was in DC recently to represent his tribe at Tribal Nations Conference. He is also a signatory to a pledge calling for the Washington Redskins to change their name, because racism.
By Mark Finkelstein | November 4, 2015 | 9:27 PM EST
Would somebody please explain the First Amendment to Quentin Tarantino? The film director apparently thinks that freedom of speech is a one-way street: he gets to call cops "murderers," but they don't get to defend themselves.
Appearing on MSNBC show this evening, asked by Chris Hayes if he was surprised by the "vitriol" of police reaction to his speech at a recent rally in New York at which he called police "murderers," Quentin whined: "I was under the impression I was an American and that I had First amendment rights." Poor baby. Yeah, you do. So do the cops.
By Mark Finkelstein | November 4, 2015 | 6:41 PM EST
Can you imagine the liberal outrage if a Republican called a prominent African-American Dem candidate "Chauncey Gardiner," the simple soul from the Peter Sellers film Being There? The cries of racism might well cost such a hapless Republican his job.
But don't expect James Carville to pay any price. On today's With All Due Respect, Carville said that a frustrated Bush "can't believe that Chauncey Gardiner [laughs] and Trump and all these people are running ahead of him." Given that Carson and Trump are the two front-runners, and that Carson, while brilliant, is soft-spoken, there would seem little doubt that Carville meant his Chauncey crack for Carson.
By Michael McKinney | November 3, 2015 | 4:34 PM EST
Tuesday at Salon.com, Sarah Burris claimed that Stephen Colbert gave a "bombshell endorsement" to Black Lives Matter, when he talked about the “excessive force by police departments across the country.” In reality, Colbert gave a moderate response to the recent controversy. Salon evoked imagery and a message that Colbert never addressed in the segment. Colbert offered only comedic pandering on the topic, rather than what Salon badly abbreviated to an “endorsement.”
By Tom Blumer | November 2, 2015 | 10:49 PM EST
On June 30, the Washington Post announced that it would be "compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty in 2015." The Post has been "tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, and whether the person was armed."
The paper's work thus far has been a revealing exercise which should be getting far more attention than it is. I believe would be getting the needed attention if the revelations were different. You see, the analysis of fatal shootings thus far shows that, in layman's terms, the overwhelming majority of them were wholly justified (HT to an Investor's Business Daily editorial).
Serena Williams Call Black Lives Matter an 'Equality Movement,' While Giving Them Credit for Things They Don’t Do
By Dylan Gwinn | November 2, 2015 | 4:57 PM EST Tennis star Serena Williams spoke out in Wired Magazine on the subject of race and equality. Unfortunately, while doing so, she chose to give props to a group that is only concerned with race, and not at all with equality.
By Michael McKinney | October 27, 2015 | 12:39 PM EDT
In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the cover story by Daniel Engber focused on the recent criminal proceedings involving Anna Stubblefield. Stubblefield has been charged of sexually assaulting a African-American disabled man. Anna Stubblefield, a philosophy professor at Rutgers, was accused of assaulting D.J., a severely disabled man she assisted with “facilitated communication.”
By Tom Johnson | October 27, 2015 | 10:44 AM EDT
It’s a tall order for a black politician to become popular with “the de facto largest white identity organization in the United States,” but DeVega argues that Carson has pulled it off by “betray[ing] the Black Freedom Struggle and assault[ing] the truth in all its forms.” (As you probably assumed, “white identity organization” is DeVega’s description of the Republican party.)
In a Salon article, DeVega attacked Carson for his recent remarks likening abortion to slavery: “Ben Carson and the other conservatives who want to limit women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies have more in common with the whites who ran the slave labor rape and charnel camps of the American South than they do with Abolitionists such as John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, or William Lloyd Garrison.” (Italics in original.)
By Matthew Balan | October 26, 2015 | 5:06 PM EDT
On Monday's CNN Newsroom, Brooke Baldwin rebuked a guest who bluntly labeled Michael Brown a "thug." Former DEA agent David Katz underlined that Darren Wilson was "by all accounts, a good police officer — did exactly what an officer is supposed to do. He was set upon by a thug named Michael Brown, who just moments before, strong-armed an Indian-American half his size." Baldwin interjected, "Come on, though. We don't need to call — let's not — 'thug'?" Katz retorted, "What epithet would you charge?" The anchor replied, "Let's just say 'Michael Brown.'"
By Brad Wilmouth | October 26, 2015 | 12:29 AM EDT
Appearing as a guest on Friday's MSNBC Live with Jose Diaz-Balart, San Francisco Board of Supervisors member David Campos defended his city's decision to keep its sanctuary city policy, and, as he began his defense, he absurdly claimed that, although the killing of Kate Steinle by an illegal immigrant was "tragic," that it is "equally tragic" that people like Donald Trump and Bill O'Reilly "scapegoat" "undocumented immigrants."
By Jeffrey Meyer | October 25, 2015 | 1:11 PM EDT
During an interview with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Face the Nation moderator John Dickerson rushed to defend the Black Lives Matter movement after the Republican presidential candidate criticized the group for calling for the murder of police officers. After Christie said Black Lives Matter should not be “justified” over their anti-police rhetoric, the CBS anchor tried to defend the movement as a whole and argued that only “individuals have” called the for the murder of police.