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My Racial Trigger: Raising Brown Babies

I’ve twice had the most profound and awe-inspiring life experience: giving birth to a child. Now ages 3 and 5, my bizarre, amusing, remarkable daughters have spent their entire lives teaching me innumerable lessons on patience, love, deep breathing, and truth-telling. Their father and I do our best to speak honestly with our girls about life (in developmentally appropriate ways, of course), believing our task is not simply to nurture children but also to raise adults whose personal and social compasses will serve them well in the world.

More than a decade of anti-racism activism combined with a nearly 4 … Read more “My Racial Trigger: Raising Brown Babies”

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Stop and Frisk Affects Us All


Campaigns that put racism front and center are not popular these days. Just ask Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He recently claimed that the New York Police Department stops whites “too much” in reaction to two pieces of legislation aimed at putting an end to the NYPD’s practice of arbitrarily over-targeting blacks and Latinos. This tactic, better known as Stop and Frisk, has resulted in an estimated 5 million or so stops, 85 percent of them involving blacks and Latinos, over the last ten years. And the topper, only 12 percent of those stops resulted in arrests, mainly for minor offenses.

The … Read more “Stop and Frisk Affects Us All”

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Racial Justice After Fisher and Shelby

In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court rulings in the Fisher affirmative action case and the Shelby County Voting Rights Act case, the post-mortems are in.

Race-based affirmative action in higher education is on its deathbed. Anti-discrimination protections for many voters are imperiled.

For the Court’s majority, two of the proudest achievements of the long Civil Rights Movement have become burdensome and outmoded, like a payphone on a troubled street corner. Even in liberal policy circles, the shibboleth of “class over race” (as if they were mutually exclusive) seems quickly becoming the new common sense.

At their … Read more “Racial Justice After Fisher and Shelby”

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Jason Richwine & the Asian American dilemma

We’ve been hearing a lot about Jason Richwine’s racist views about Hispanics and immigration.  Richwine is the co-author of the widely discredited–even by other conservative think tanksHeritage Foundation report and the author of the infamous dissertation in which he calls Hispanics stupid.  I’m not going to go into the  particulars of that argument because lots of other people have already done so and done it well.  It’s also well established that there is a sordid history of trying to link IQ and race in the service of racism.

What we haven’t been hearing so much about is … Read more “Jason Richwine & the Asian American dilemma”