Free Republic

America fascinated me as America fascinates every newcomer. Nineteen years old and fleeing the study of medicine at my Nigerian university, I longed to be a writer, to live a life of the mind. From my first days, I watched and read and learned. I was struck by the excess and the newness of America, by its flagrant contradictions, but mostly by how identity as an idea shaped so much of American life....... Shortly after the Black American George Floyd was murdered by a White police officer, a woman told me she had just read Americanah. “You are a prophet;...

Joy Reid has slammed the NFL for trying to 'sanitize Blackness' from the Super Bowl after Eminem took the knee during the half-time show. The MSNBC host, wearing a football jersey in support of Colin Kaepernick, said she has fallen out of love with the game over its apparent inaction against racism and the lack of Black coaches in the sport, in comments echoing resident Joe Biden. Reid and her panel of hosts noted how Eminem has been praised for taking the knee during his performance in what was nothing more than a 'performative' gesture, but Kaepernick has remained unsigned...

The group of moms that’s acted as a buffer for protesters in Portland is being accused of “anti-blackness” by another advocacy group in the city. Don’t Shoot PDX posted a lengthy message on Instagram urging people to stop supporting Portland Wall of Moms, the crew of mothers in yellow shirts who’ve stood between protesters and federal agents in recent weeks. “The lies are finally clear and we are sad but ultimately not surprised that anti-Blackness showed it’s ugly face with Wall of Moms,” the black-led Don’t Shoot PDX wrote in the post on Wednesday. The nonprofit accuses Wall of Moms...

In addition to covering her wedding costs, Robinson, a Democrat from a Memphis district elected in 2018, is charged with using the funds to pay for her honeymoon and pay legal fees for her divorce, the feds charge. With the stolen money the lawmaker also paid for her daughter’s 2016 Jeep Renegade, home improvements, a $500 Louis Vuitton handbag and invested in a snow cone business run by her children, prosecutors and the FBI said. Robinson was charged with theft, embezzlement and wire fraud. Despite the charges, she said she will continue to serve in the state legislature “with the...

**SNIP** In a nod to the racist birther conspiracy that enveloped President Barack Obama, a tweet claiming Harris wasn’t eligible to run for president because of her immigrant parents went viral. It has been repeated as fact so often that Harris is now forced to explain her ethnic background. Was nothing learned from Obama’s run for president? He also faced the same inane, pointless questions about his mixed-race identity as Harris. Just like Obama, Harris has exposed narrow-minded views of blackness with her presidential run. Harris is a multi-racial woman who was born in Oakland, went to high school in...

On February 6, 2012, a teenager walking home with a pack of skittles through a quiet, middle-class Florida neighborhood was shot dead. The riots and outrage that followed brought the issue of race to the forefront and, from the Rose Garden, the President spoke to an embattled nation. “You know,” he said, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” The shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of the neighborhood watch shooter that followed in July of 2013 came under public scrutiny. Black America was up in arms over what they perceived as a national atrocity. Had...

Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim U.S. soldier who was killed in Iraq, kept up his attacks on Donald Trump on Sunday, saying the world is seeing the "blackness" of the Republican presidential nominee's soul. The world is receiving us like we’ve never seen,” Khan said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” "They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul.”

In so many ways and to our great hurt, Obama really has kept his promise to 'fundamentally change America' In his recent commencement address at Howard University our president’s racism-laced message to graduates strategically included the words, “Have confidence in your blackness.” But what most got my attention was that his entire speech was presented in his own version of ‘homeboy’ with a clumsy Ebonic lilt/cadence. The down-home, laid-back talk that he couldn’t quite pull off was, in my view, an embarrassing insult to the noble scholars and their parents, many of whom just wanted to enjoy the moment and...

CHAPEL HILL (WTVD) - A UNC town hall meeting on race relations on college campuses was disrupted Thursday evening by a group of students who took over the event and read off a lengthy list of 50 demands. The list of demands titled "A collective Response to Anti-blackness" labels UNC Chapel Hill as an "unethical institution" which exploits labor, runs an "athletic industrial complex", and treats people of color as "less than essential to the everyday running of UNC." The demands rang from the removal of the new system president, mandatory training for students and staff on the "historical racial...

received an email from a black man who was attempting to convince me that, though I am completely black, I have no experience growing up black in America. The bulk of his theory on my ‘blackness' was based on the fact that I constantly lampoon Obama in my blog. He counseled me to embrace Obama, as Obama could help me to "rediscover the black experience." He warned that "whites would never see me, as I see me." Touting Obama as the poster child for blackness is a ridiculous notion. Further, the idea that Obama can teach me "blackness" is equally...

I was annoyed the first time an African American man called me "sister." It was in a Brooklyn store, and I had recently arrived from Nigeria, a country where, thanks to the mosquitoes that kept British colonizers from settling, my skin color did not determine my identity, did not limit my dreams or my confidence. And so, although I grew up reading books about the baffling places where black people were treated badly for being black, race remained an exotic abstraction: It was Kunta Kinte. Until that day in Brooklyn. To be called "sister" was to be black, and blackness...

LONDON – The fate of the world economy hinges on what happens to house prices in America and that may not be a good thing, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said on Monday. Speaking at the Reuters headquarters in London, the former Fed chair delivered a gloomy prognosis on the state of the global economy – U.S. house prices are likely to fall further and they could drag the rest of the world with them. * * * “The critical variable in this judgement is the price of homes in the United States,” said Greenspan, who ran the U.S....

Whenever I start thinking about all the damage that's been done to America by the social engineering socialists, I have to remind myself that some of my best friends are left-wingers. That doesn't do much for my blood pressure, but at least it serves to remind me that they're not all as self-righteous as George Soros, as fatuous as Michael Moore, as smarmy as Jimmy Carter, as shrill as Nancy Pelosi, as hypocritical as George Murtha, Ted Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd, or as deceptive as Barack Obama, the fellow with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate...

Sharpton: Don’t let whites redefine usMarch 12, 2006 By Andy Grimm / Post-Tribune staff writer Reverend Al Sharpton arrives at a party to celebrate the 24 American Idol semi-finalists at Cinespace in Hollywood February 18, 2006. REUTERS/Max Morse GARY — A New York teenager named Al Sharpton left the 1972 Black Political Convention here believing that blacks could win any elected office. Nearly 30 years later — and two years after a failed run for a presidential nomination — Sharpton returned to Gary’s West Side High School as Saturday’s keynote speaker for the 2006 National Black Peoples Unity Convention. Though...

Must see TV this morning to see if Katie Couric is showing her "bitter main stream media" face this morning as she discusses the Iraqi elections. It'll be curious to see if her sad angry steely eyed gaze will be worse than back on November 3rd after Kerry's loss.