Conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson have claimed in recent Washington Post columns that in his March 18th speech on race, Barack Obama tried to equate his grandmother’s fear of Black males passing on the street and Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Obama’s political fortunes being based on his blackness with the “vitriolic and anti-American” comments of his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He didn’t do that. What he did was describe the roots and expressions of racial resentment that Americans carry with them and suggest that at least some of them stem from legitimate fears. By acknowledging and validating these sentiments he tried to open up a conversation about race that begins with a mutual concession- all Americans have felt pain, resentment, invisibility and misunderstanding connected to their race at some point and the beginning of healing is the validation of all of those emotions and reactions on all sides. (more…)
The False Equivalence of False Equivalence
The Olson Outrage
Sarah Jane Olson’s arrest at an airport and re-incarceration only a few days after being released from prison is the latest example of the failure of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to shift its culture from one based on punishment and prisoner recycling to rehabilitation and community re-integration. The old punishment culture that produced the determinate sentencing regime in the late 1970’s made it next to impossible to release inmates that no longer poised a threat to public safety. By taking away discretion in sentencing from parole boards and Judges the State has left thousands of inmates languishing in prison long after they’ve been rehabilitated. (more…)
The Ali- Woods folk in the road: Why Obama must talk about race
Mitt Romney had to directly address religion during his primary run in order to assuage the concerns of a critical part of the Republican Party base. Now Obama must speak up about race in order to make clear to all Americans how he views himself in relation to this country’s racial history and contemporary race controversies. Every new week seems to bring fresh calls for Obama to denounce another prominent Black in order to prove how patriotic or politically mainstream he is. This will not stop. If he doesn’t draw a line and more importantly explain where and why he’s drawing the line, these demands are sure to become more audacious and demeaning. Obama had wished this could wait until after the nomination. Clinton’s continued presence in the race has made the issue more immediate.