Many issues limit the progress of African Americans today. Here I will address two that get too little attention. 1. One is the denial of the history of racial oppression by whites 2. The other is the reluctance of African Americans to talk about that racial oppression. Most whites acknowledge segregation; however, many typify it … [Read more…]
“A fraud on the American public.” That is how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. In 1990, this solid conservative was expressing the widely held consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum. Nowadays those words seem quaint, as an … [Read more…]
The Race and Social Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech, which I direct, recently held its seventh annual Combating Racial Injustice Workshop. We examined one of the continuing areas of injustice—the so-called juvenile justice system. Despite a drop in overall arrest rates nationally, black youth are still twice as likely to be arrested as white … [Read more…]
He would be very active and pushing others to join him, on the same issues he was fighting at the time of his death–the three major evils as he called them: the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. In this time of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s … [Read more…]