By Keith Rushing
New Orleans throws America’s racial problems in your face with the force of a knockout punch. This past week, during my first visit here, I was struck by the contrast in New Orleans’ neighborhoods.
When driving through Black neighborhoods, I often found myself passing seemingly endless blocks of ramshackle shotgun houses on dimly […]

By Keith Rushing
Prince William County, Va., has taken a financial hit because of its backward, regressive immigration policies, which require police to check the legal status of anyone suspected of a crime, including traffic violators.
Last week, Prince William County jail officials revealed that it went about $800,000 over budget to house undocumented immigrants since the […]

By Keith Rushing
The whole anti-immigrant uproar in this country is primarily due to one thing — racism. The furor is not about terrorists crossing the borders, or cultural differences; it’s simply about race, and the unwillingness of some people to accept those who don’t look like them.
Those who don’t get this need to read about […]

By Keith Rushing
CHICAGO – This week, nearly 6,000 journalists of color converged at McCormick Place, Chicago’s convention center, to grapple with the cataclysmic changes impacting the news media in 2008.
The gathering of The UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc. convention represents a significant success in multiracial coalition-building to diversify the ranks of reporters, editors […]

When China won the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, it was due in good part to human rights pledges. Beijing made these pledges after losing its first bid to host the games in 1993, largely because of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
In his final presentation to win the Games, Beijing Mayor and Bidding Committee […]

By Keith Rushing
Uncle Sam wants African Americans to join its ranks of agents who police and patrol U.S. borders.
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By Keith Rushing
When I learned that a 19-year-old African American man, Ronnie L. White, was strangled in a Prince George County jail cell last week, it disgusted me, but it came as no shock.
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Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional for those who commit the horrendous crime of child-rape–as long as the crime doesn’t result in death. It is a decent step in the right direction, but way short of outlawing capital punishment altogether, which is unequally carried out in the U.S. In […]

By Daniel Zeno
Towards the end of the Civil War, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist former slaves. The government promised former slaves the opportunity to buy or lease 40 acres of unoccupied lands that had been confiscated by the Union. They also promised to loan the ex-slaves […]

Well-known filmmakers Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee have been battling this week over the portrayal, well, actually, the non-portrayal, of Black soldiers in some of Eastwood’s war films.
The heated exchange between the two escalated after Eastwood bluntly responded to Lee’s recent complaint that two World War II flicks Eastwood directed — “Flags of our […]