christopher_hallam

I love The Root, but Jimi Izrael‘s ridiculous post, “Obama hates black fathers” is hard to take. Izrael’s evidence for this ridiculous assertion is a line from a speech that is more than a year old and hardly inflammatory: “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said, “we’ll admit that… too many fathers also are […]

Jeremiah Wright tries to walk back his comment yesterday that “them Jews” won’t let him talk to Obama: “Let me say like Hillary, I misspoke,” Wright said. “Let me just say: Zionists.” Wright said “I’m not talking about all Jews, all people of the Jewish faith, I’m talking about Zionists.” Yeah. Because all Zionists are […]

I’m not going to rush to say the DHS report on right-wing extremism has been vindicated. The report was very broad, and we’ve seen in the past how painting groups with broad ideological brushes has led to government surveillance of nonviolent groups on the left. The issue shouldn’t be that the DHS report was “right”, […]

It doesn’t entirely surprise me that the GOP would seek to find a patron saint in Eminem–deep textual analysis of Hip-hop lyrics isn’t what the party’s known for. If there’s one thing Eminem has been conflicted about his entire career, it’s his appeal to white people who only listen to rap music made by white […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates pulls together some numbers on interracial marriage between blacks and Jews and proclaims the end of the black-Jewish alliance:  19 percent of blacks “oppose” or “strongly oppose” a relative marrying someone Jewish, while 31 percent favor or “favor” or “strongly favor” the unions. The remaining 50 percent of blacks don’t care. 38 percent […]

Get specific. Jamelle Bouie explains, responding to Jim Antle: Now, to be fair, Antle isn’t arguing that white male judges should be able to celebrate (I’ve probably used that word too much for one post) their whiteness and maleness. No, he’s arguing that multiculturalism is unfair insofar that it permits a hispanic woman or a […]

The Washington Post‘s profile of Sonia Sotomayor‘s activist days notes that the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which Sotomayor worked for, devoted part of its efforts to fighting racial gerrymandering of political districts. The piece wonders what this might mean for issues of voting rights that might come up before the court, such […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates says that the Roland Burris saga is like a “Greek Tragedy.” I think that’s mistaken. Burris’ journey more resembles a Shakespearean tragedy along the lines of King Lear, where the main character has made an initial foolish decision that dooms them from the beginning of the play. Oedipus could have just let Laius […]

Nicholas Kristof wonders whether liberal and conservative is all about “divergent neural responses”, and says if we just talked more to each other, we might be able to be cool. I have a number of problems with the reasoning here, Kristof writes: One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on […]