April V. Taylor FOX News Bill O’Reilly is known to make comments that stir up controversy, and in a recent interview with PBS radio host Tavis Smiley, he left Smiley baffled as he alleged that Black people are to blame for their economic problems and admitted that Republicans are scared of Black people. The conversation took place on an episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” where the two discussed the Black…
Zambian president Michael Sata died last week, and his country is now embroiled in controversy over the white vice-president, Guy Scott, who has stepped into the role of acting president. Scott will remain as acting president for three months until emergency elections can be held to elect a new president. Many are questioning whether or not he can legitimately hold the office of acting president because Zambia’s constitution require than…
April V. Taylor In what is appearing to be an attempt to suppress the voices of mostly Black and Hispanic voters in Georgia, some 40,000 voter registration applications have mysteriously vanished since being turned in to state and local officials earlier this year. Every vote counts, but this election is particularly pressing because the Georgia governor and U.S. Senate races are neck and neck. In a moves that are causing…
April V Taylor Missouri state senator Jamilah Nasheed was arrested by Ferguson police for blocking traffic outside of the Ferguson police department. It was also reported that Nasheed refused bond and spent the night in jail. While it appears as though her act of civil disobedience was meant to show solidarity with peaceful protestors, many who have been on the front lines ridiculed Nasheed for the events surrounding her arrest….
In the video below, Dr. Umar Johnson talks about black feminism. The popular scholar says that many of the black feminists in America today are what he calls “man haters.” He says that their dislike for men, especially black men, is derived from being hurt by men in the past, through some kinds of sexual abuse, emotional abuse or physical abuse. Johnson says that good men are led to…
April V. Taylor The Florida based social justice organization Dream Defenders has launched a satirical ad for The Dream Vest, which is being marketed to “provide safety for all children with high productions of melanin to protect them from unwarranted state violence on civilians.” The initiative is using the hashtag #VestorVote and is meant to draw attention to the fact that people of color are disproportionately targets of police violence…
April V. Taylor In a surprising turn of events during an event keynoted by Dr. Cornel West, a group of young activists who have been on the front lines in Ferguson, Missouri protested a speech given by NAACP President Cornell William Brooks at Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis. Activist and journalist Rosa Clemente describes what happened as follows, at “a gathering of over 3,000 people…at some point the young people…
Barack Obama’s election was hailed by many as the beginning of a post-racial America in which Black people were going to experience new-found equality. This hope for a post-racial America has been dashed by the fact that recent statistics show that Black Americans have not actually improved in many areas of inequality but instead have stayed the same or gotten worse since Obama’s election. One of the areas that has…
by Dr Boyce Watkins Today, in the inbox on my Facebook page, I received a message from a woman by the name of Elle Robinson. Elle wanted to tell me about her husband, Quawntay Adams. I receive a lot of messages about the many injustices taking place in our criminal justice system, but this one stood out to me a little more than most. Mr. Adams received a 35-year prison sentence…
April V. Taylor For anyone who was holding out hope that the euphoria the country experienced after Barack Obama’s historic election would somehow magically improve centuries of racism, the reality has set in for many that this is just not the case. As the nation watched Obama be inaugurated as the 44th President and the first President of color in 2012, many felt that he was ushering in a new…
efore scoffing at this headline, you should know that in 1999, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than three decades after MLK’s death, a jury found local, state, and federal government agencies guilty of conspiring to assassinate the Nobel Peace Prize winner and civil rights leader. The same media you would expect to cover such a monumental decision was absent at the trial, because those news organizations were part of that conspiracy….
Minister Louis Farrakhan is one of the most respected and appreciated voices in all of black America. So, when the tragedy of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri took place, Farrakhan was one of the first to speak on the matter. Farrakhan gave a recent address in which he stated that the Michael Brown shooting was a mere microcosm of what’s been happening all throughout the United States. He says…
April V. Taylor There were several black leaders and celebrities who attended the funeral of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9th. Among them was Al Sharpton, who also delivered Brown’s eulogy. Many young people in Ferguson have spoken out out about the fact that they do not consider Sharpton to be their leader, and a recent…
by Melissa Cordner If I hear one more person claim the people of Ferguson are “just playing the race card,” I am going to scream. If one more person tells me to calm down because Ferguson “doesn’t affect me,” I am going to scream. The truth, of course, is that we’ve all been screaming for ten days… or for hundreds of years. WHITE PEOPLE—THIS AFFECTS YOU. White people—I care because I, as an…
Given the racial tensions in Ferguson, MO following the kιlling of unarmed teen Michael Brown, one would think that news networks would reach out to African-Americans when discussing the topic. For most networks, this has been the case, but Fox News put together a segment on Ferguson that included no African-Americans and Rev. Jesse Jackson called out the network for the obvious exclusion, while appearing on Fox. Meanwhile, Dr. Ben…