Free Republic

In 2002, Michael Green extracted a single promise from me during the year I spent reporting about his life after he spent 13 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. Green, who is African-American, knew I’d be giving a lot of speeches about his story, including at high schools in Cleveland. He saw an opportunity to save lives. “Tell the boys,” he said to me over and over. “Tell the boys this comes from me: If the police stop you, don’t ever run. Take your hands out of your pockets. Immediately. Put your hands over your head....

A prominent Marxist educator, Shakti Butler, uses the following definition of "racist": Racist - A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. Butler then uses the following term to describe "reverse racism": Reverse racist - A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and...

Next week I will participate in a racial discrimination hearing against a Manhattan night club that frisked and searched me when I attended on a "Black night" but does not search patrons on mostly white nights. Last week, I was accused of stealing an iPhone by a white woman in Miami who came up to me and asked if she could search my pockets to find it. It was not a joke or a pickup line. And just last month, I had to pull out my own iPhone to photograph and report the license plate and medallion number of a...

The family that George Zimmerman rescued from an overturned SUV in Florida last week is white ... this according to the police report obtained by TMZ. According to the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, the two adults who were pulled out of their overturned SUV on July 17 were described as a white male and a white female. The report states that the SUV was traveling toward an off-ramp on State Road 417 when the driver lost control ... causing the vehicle to "go off road and roll over." As we previously reported, two men responded to the accident and helped...

Even before the jury read their verdict acquitting George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a number of black religious leaders had responses at the ready. The voices of white pastors and predominantly white churches and religious groups? Much harder to find. Nearly a week later, some denominations that often weigh in on matters of national policy have yet to go on the public record. It's particularly notable in the leadership of the Catholic Church, the country's largest religious body. Admittedly, the flood of responses from black religious leaders was a partly a function of where the TV...

Four words of advice for African-Americans in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal: Wake the hell up. The Sunday after Zimmerman went free was a day of protest for many of us. From Biscayne Boulevard in Miami to Leimert Park in Los Angeles, to the Daley Center in Chicago to Times Square in New York City, African-Americans — and others who believe in racial justice — carried out angry, but mostly peaceful, demonstrations. Good. This is as it should have been. But if that’s the end, if you just get it out of your system, then move ahead with business...

If there is one hopeful note amid all the anguish and recrimination from the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it’s that growing numbers of white people have come to appreciate whiteness for what it is: an unearned set of privileges. And as a result of that dawning awareness, it’s become possible to imagine a day when that structure of privilege is dismantled — by white people. Recall that immediately after the killing of Trayvon Martin, people of every race took to the Internet to declare “I am Trayvon Martin.” They wore hoodies. They proclaimed solidarity. That was a well-meaning and earnest...

We've compiled 5 things white people can learn from Rachel Jeantel. Take notes. 1. Words like "cracka" and "nigga" don't carry the weight we've associated with them. . . . 4. She's not the hostile ghetto black girl everyone painted her to be. . . . 5. Rachel's not uneducated, we are. Rachel is not in fact the uneducated girl Don West and the Zimmerman team painted her to be. She's a young girl with an underbite, street smarts and a bit of a southern accent. She speaks the same language we speak - the Queen's English, as her opposition...

Defense attorneys knew a jury of five white women and one Hispanic woman would find it difficult to identify with the humanity of a Black teenage boy.When I was a kid in Florida, I remember the old folks used to play Bingo. As far as I could tell, it was purely a game of luck. If they called your number, you simply moved your chip onto the appropriate space on the board. But what if a player controlled the boards that were distributed or the numbers that were called. That would obviously raise a ruckus, of course, unless it was...

Yesterday, six women in the state of Florida, five of them white, made clear that the inherent value of black life and black personhood is legally indefensible. The legal sanctioning of George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin gives veracity to an argument that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney made in 1857: A black person has “no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” No, George Zimmerman is not white. But his assumptions about black men are rooted in the foundational assumptions of white supremacy and his treatment by the justice system have conferred upon him privileges usually reserved...

School segregation remains a reality: “74 percent of African Americans still attend majority nonwhite schools, compared to just over 76 percent in the late 1960s,” writes The Nation‘s Greg Kauffman. But there’s a demographic reality to consider, responds Matthew Yglesias in Slate. U.S. schools are running low on white kids. Non-Hispanic whites were 54 percent of the under-18 population in 2010, compared to 74 percent in 1980, according to the Census Bureau. Furthermore, among kids under the age of 5, non-Hispanic whites are a minority. [...] We can’t integrate our way to better school performance, agrees Sara Mead. That includes...

George Zimmerman might be on the verge of becoming the next O.J. Simpson. He’s the defendant in the high profile case out of Sanford, Fla., that has launched a million discussions and a thousand protests across the country, including Myrtle Beach, Columbia and throughout the Carolinas. A jury of six women will decide if the prosecution has presented enough evidence to rebut Zimmerman’s claim of self defense. He shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin during a confrontation that began after Zimmerman believed, for reasons unexplained, Martin was suspicious for walking home from the store. No matter what the jury decides, the...

Whenever I hear of Republicans supporting the prosecution of Mormon Fundamentalist sects which practice polygamy, I often shake my head in amazement. Republicans are often called the stupid party, because they support liberal policies that harm the interests of the the party and its supporters. First of all, polygamous lifestyles are perfectly legal in America, for people associated with leftist causes. Hippie Communes were very common in America in the 1960s and 1970s, and they received high-profile favorable coverage in the liberal media. Communes were places where many men and women lived together in a spirit of free-love, and most...

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, GlobalGrind went out of its way to advance Obama’s vision of racial harmony. Both pieces received over 30,000 Facebook “likes.” Both opinion pieces established a premise as fact that white people can never understand the black condition. Both pieces went out of their way to reinforce that what was on display during Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial, was not actually what was seen and heard. What makes this worth noting is that this is deliberate Balkanization of a segment of America. It seeks to replace justice with self-serving cant....

Sarah Palin is back! Not only did she get another Fox News contract, she was the star of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Conference this past weekend for her slashing attacks not only on President Obama and Democrats but on Republican sellouts (and 2016 hopefuls) like Jeb Bush. Watching Palin gleefully take on Bush, who made a dumb comment about needing immigration reform because immigrants are “more fertile” than native-born Americans, I realized that Palin’s star really is rising again, at a time of heightened racial insecurity on the white far-right. They need a hero, and here she is again....

More white people died in the United States last year than were born, a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year. “We’re jumping the gun on a long, slow decline of our white population, which is going to characterize this century,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. Earlier this year, census figures showed that for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of babies were minorities.

Oops! A casting call for a new host of a children's program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the taxpayer supported, government-owned television and radio network of Canada, accidentally told the truth, when it specified "any race except Caucasian." See for yourself: Adrain Humphries of the National Post reports: A casting call to hire a new CBC host that specifically said white people need not apply has been withdrawn, with the casting agent offering apologies for the mistake. The original ad for the host of a children's show, posted on the casting agency's website under a CBC logo and on Craigslist,...

The state of equality and justice in America is shameful-especially since the election of President Barack Obama. Unlike many of my friends who think America is going to hell in a hand basket, and have given up thinking things will get better for those who've been marginalized for so long, I still have hope for a better day. When Barack Obama was running for President of the United States, a close friend told me, "Mark my word. When Senator Obama is elected, some people will go absolutely crazy, and after he's re-elected, they will go mad!" His rationale was that...

You won't find anyone willing to dare say it much in the media, but a good percentage of the white men who oppose gun control of any sort – and who back measures that would even allow alleged terrorists and straw purchases for drug dealers to buy guns – are just afraid that without their guns, their phallic power will be reduced to size. You can feel at least temporarily reassured when a long-barreled assault weapon compensates for just another average manhood; it's an irresistable testosterone high to the beleaguered white male. Call this Freudian psychobabble analysis, but when you...

On Tuesday, the Hill published a story noting that the organizers of the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the preeminent national confab for politicians and activists of the right, are responding to the last November's election by using the event to "showcase the movement's 'diversity.'" Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Sarah Palin will be headlining, but 20 percent of the panelists this year will be African American, according to CPAC bean counters. And the CPACers proudly point to the prominent role of Latinos and women on various panels. Yet the CPAC organizers have neglected one important task as they...