Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod claims she was abruptly fired by the Obama administration because the White House feared Glenn Beck would target her in a segment on his show. (Which he did anyway, of course.) Ben Jealous, NAACP president, claims that he was “snookered” by “the right” into misrepresenting, exploiting and demonizing Sherrod. The way the Obama administration and the NAACP bungled the case of Shirley Sherrod should disturb and alarm everyone concerned with fairness, courage and racial honesty.

Denied due process, Shirley Sherrod was misrepresented, exploited, demonized …

I know there’s a need for the NAACP, but I have not always been sure that the organization itself understands where it is needed in the times since the white-hot days of the 60’s and 70’s. Like many of my contemporaries, I have been frustrated with the NAACP’s slowness to embrace and utilize digital technology to get important work done. Further, I’ve sometimes perceived lack of a unifying focus. I let my membership lapse.
But my friend Kevin Myles, president of NAACP Kansas, has been steadfast in his commitment to the …

While some people are overly invested in the trial of former BART transit cop Johannes Mehserle who was convicted Thursday of involuntary manslaughter for shooting Oscar Grant, life will go on. It seems much of the outrage stems from those who have focused primarily on the race of the cop in question, making Oscar Grant the poster child for racism conspiracy theories.
What most do not realize is there is little “new” about cases such as these. While historically there has been an established pattern of aggression where innocent men were …

Please check out my response to Erica Jong’s racially insulting she wrote for The Huffington Post.
My answer is posted over at Aol. Here’s an excerpt:
Some people are blinded by their own racial arrogance. They are so convinced that their perspective is relevant on what life is like for people of color, that they regurgitate hackneyed perspectives on race as if they are revelations. Writer Erica Jong, famous for books including”Fear of Flying,” published a column in The Huffington Post that stands as exhibit A of this kind of annoyance.
Jong …

Displaying more dignity and grace than most anyone else could have mustered under the circumstances, Haiti’s Ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, offered a precise explanation of history to address the odious comments Pat Robertson made yesterday while men, women and children lay trapped in agony.

I am absolutely sick of people defending hate filled oratory.
Trent Lott’s comments “weren’t said with malice”.
Rush Limbaugh’s “just trying to rile people up”.
Both words and deeds count.
Think about it.

The FBI released its 2008 Hate Crime Statistics report yesterday. Overall Hate crimes were up 2%. That’s bad and it gets worse. In the wake of President Obama’s election, hate crimes against blacks rose 8%.
Hate incidents related to the election occurred in all parts of the country. An interracial couple in Apolacan Township, Pa., who supported Obama, found the remains of a burnt cross in their garden. In Madison County, Idaho, elementary school children allegedly chanted “assassinate Obama” on a school bus. In Mount Desert Island, Maine, black effigies …

The Mississippi Klan stirred up plenty of protest and not much else when they marched onto the University of Mississippi campus last Saturday.
OXFORD, Miss. — Wearing traditional red, black and white robes and carrying flags representing the infamous hate group, about 10 hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan protested on the Ole Miss campus Saturday.
The protest, held on the steps of Fulton Chapel, fizzled after less than 10 minutes and faced a large counter-protest from students and onlookers.
The Klan traveled to Oxford to protest Ole Miss Chancellor …

As I read Andrew’s second essay, I begin to accept that we live in mutually exclusive social realities. And that’s a painful recognition for me. As friends we share revulsion at the exploding deficit, clarity about keeping government out of our bedrooms and the belief that it is an inalienable right to keep guns in our homes. Further, we both do our best to accept each person we encounter as an individual without slathering on layers preconceived notions and expectations of stereotypical behavior.
But on the broader political plane, we’re …

“Does Conservative Mean Racist,” kicked off a dynamic discussion over on twitter yesterday. If you have an account, please follow me @allaboutrace and I hope others in the All About Race community will leave their twitter accounts in the comment section here so we can rap through our tweets. Anyhow, reactions to Andrew’s post ranged from frustrated and fed up, to tempered disagreement, to full on support.
I felt some disappointment about the conclusions he reached, but I know he often feels the same about mine. Still, obviously, I am steadfast …

Congressman John Lewis and the white man who beat him bloody during a civil rights protest in 1961, came together to accept the Common Ground award Thursday night. “The Common Ground Awards are presented annually to honor outstanding accomplishments in conflict resolution, negotiation, community building, and peacebuilding. Recipients have made significant contributions toward bridging divides between people, finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and providing inspiration, and hope where often there was none.”
The reconciliation journeys of Rep. John Lewis and Elwin Wilson embody the best of these principles.

According to AP:
Elwin …

Gallup is at it again, seeking to quantify racial attitudes that are hard to measure. I’ve never been called by Gallup, but if they asked me questions regarding future racial healing, I would likely give starkly different answers depending what was going on for me at the moment. Some days I’m hopeful, some days not as much. So I wonder what was going on with these respondents when they picked up the phone?
PRINCETON, NJ — A majority of Americans, 56%, believe that a solution to America’s race-relations problem will …

There is nothing more anti-American than to lie about our nation’s multi-colored history. To see our nation in all of her glory is to see our remarkable democracy as an awesome human undertaking. But Pat Buchanan, and so many others like him, will never be able to embrace the promise and the purpose that the Founding Fathers laid out because it now includes all people who seek freedom not just white men.

Since the presidential campaign of 2008 and the election of our nation’s first black president, Patrick J. Buchanan has …

Once upon a time, not too long ago, smart and well meaning conservative friends would say to me, “We conservatives don’t talk about race.” I always laughed at that, mostly because I have too long a memory. I remember racist rants by conservative icons like Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley. But I appreciated the “big tent” sentiment they were intending to convey.
Now even my conservative friends cannot deny the depth of rotting racist decay eating away at the heart of their movement. I am hoping I will soon hear …

Please click over and take a look at my AOL piece: Supreme Court Rules in Favor of White Firefighters – BV Black Spin posted yesterday about the ‘New Haven 20′. Here’s an excerpt:
I’ve always been wary of the way the city of New Haven handled the results of its now infamous firefighter promotion test. It never made sense to me. When test results came back, and no black firefighters had scores high enough for immediate promotion, New Haven decided to throw out the results of the test on the grounds …

This post is one of many posted in this weekend’s blogging campaign encouraging all of us to remember that we can do better to get our points across than to use simplistic and hateful speech or resort to violence to get our points across. The cartoon of Judge Sotomayor and the murder of Dr. George Tiller brought the sad power of racist marginalization and dehumanizing rhetoric right up to our eyes where we cannot ignore it.

Let me be very clear about why I am offended by Chip Bok’s characterization of …