Adam Serwer

The New York Times editorial page is a real bright spot when it comes to criminal-justice issues, and today’s editorial on recently passed laws in several states that make it easier to hire the formerly incarcerated is no different: A new law that takes effect in Connecticut in October bars government employers or licensing agencies […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Barack Obama and Shirley Sherrod: More disturbingly, this is what happens when you treat the arrest of a black man, in his home, as something that can be fixed over beers. This is what happens when you silently ascent to the notion that racism and its victims are somehow equally wrong. The […]

The place once known as “Bad” Baker County, Georgia, Historian Taylor Branch explains in the first book of his three-volume history of the civil-rights movement, is where a rather infamous chapter in civil-rights history took place. It involves the establishment of a legal precedent adopted through the kind of pretzel logic typical of attempts at […]

I’ll be traveling to Netroots Nation today, so there won’t be as much blogging. In the meantime, you should check out my story on what happened to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Ed O’Keefe provides some insight into the administration’s decision making in the firing of Shirley Sherrod: When this department was established in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, he referred to it as the people’s department,” Vilsack told colleague Krissah Thompson in Feburary. “In order to be consistent with that legacy, it’s necessary that our programs and […]

From Media Matters’ transcript of former USDA Official Shirley Sherrod‘s speech before the NAACP: SHERROD: — you know. The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm. He took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me — I knew […]

For all the left’s mocking of Andrew Breitbart, in the post-ACORN era the Obama administration seems to have taken a reflexive supine position on any selectively edited “bombshell” stories he happens to produce. In this case, Breitbart responded to the NAACP’s request that the Tea Party purge the racist elements of its movement by releasing […]

The administration’s handling of the Shirley Sherrod matter is truly embarrassing. The NAACP’s response wasn’t any better. Didn’t we learn anything from the ACORN controversy? Y’all have killed the funniness of the Old Spice guy. Lindsey Graham dramatically casts his vote to move Elena Kagan out of committee. This past week has proved Eric Holder […]

After my post on New York Gov. David Paterson signing a law getting rid of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk database, a reader e-mailed me to say that my statement that 80 percent of those stopped are black and Latino might actually be low. According to The New York Times‘ graph, the number is actually 87 percent.