Adam Serwer

John McWhorter, in a recent BloggingHeads episode, talks to Richard Thompson Ford about the “acting white” phenomenon. The joy of a school where nobody can be called white because nobody can be called white, because nobody’s white, nobody white is around. And obviously the idea is not the kind of school that Jonathan Kozol doesn’t […]

I suppose it was inevitable, but the conservative media’s obsession with the New Black Panther Party scandal has seen the reemergence of Hans von Spakovsky as a “credible” source on the alleged politicization of the Justice Department. Who is Hans von Spakofsky? Well the internal Justice Department report on politicized hiring in the Civil Rights […]

Conservatives have sought to portray the plan to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero as a kind of end-zone dance on the part of Muslims worldwide, a celebration of the deaths caused by the 9/11 attacks. This doesn’t really make much sense — the organization building the center, the Cordoba House, is a […]

The Washington Post has undertaken a rather large investigative project in Dana Priest and William Arkin‘s “Top Secret America.” Yesterday, in a rather unusual step, The New York Times urged their own readers to check out the competition. “We encourage you to take a look at it,” read the conclusion of an unsigned blog post […]

Yesterday Spencer Ackerman paraphrased what he called the intelligence community’s “awesomely bad” pushback against Dana Priest and William Arkin‘s first story on the national-security industrial complex, which was basically to cite a government regulation preventing contractors from performing “inherently governmental” activities: See? We’re not hiring corporations to make the government run! We have a regulation […]

Time to rethink the implicit secrecy bargain. Pat Buchanan really is racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic, but he’s a member of the right tribe, so it’s OK. The shrink-ray theft scene in Despicable Me was racist, but the minions seemed to me to be unionized, genetically altered corn pops and not really racialized. What does it […]

Eisenhower signing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, creating the Civil Rights Division. Fresh off of suggesting The Washington Post should screen new hires for the thought crime of private personal opinion, Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander chides the newspaper for not catching on quicker to the New Black Panther Party controversy, the day it mostly fell […]

When the Umar Abdulmutallab incident happened, I was among those (Sanchez, Greenwald, Ackerman) pointing out that “we need to consider that part of the problem is the sheer volume of information being gathered almost indiscriminately, making it difficult to divine real threats from false ones.” The broad conclusion of Dana Priest and William Arkin‘s first […]

So, with the idea of outside pressure on the Civil Rights Division to drop the New Black Panther Case unsubstantiated, the exposure of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ investigation of the case as politically motivated, and the Justice Department’s intervention on behalf of white voters in Noxubee County, Mississippi, there’s really only one part […]