Here is some reading to celebrate Martin Luther King Day: Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I confess up front I have not read the book. I’ve just read some things about it. Here is a short write-up from the author’s interview on NPR. The book...
Read More »

A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Dallas girl was deported by U.S. immigration officials to Colombia. She spoke no Spanish and they did appear not to have even checked her fingerprints to ensure she was who they thought she was. It’s true, she gave a false name to local police, but there is simply no excuse...
Read More »

A troubling agreement among divergent ideological strains in America has emerged over the years: China’s growing wealth is a problem worthy of a political solution. It is a focus of anger and frustration that unifies much of the left—unionists, opponents of free trade and corporations, agitators for regulatory harmonization, consumer “advocates” demonizing the Yellow...
Read More »

CNN reports that the “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans is causing quite a stir in the People’s Republic of Berkeley. Seems like the demonstration of just how out of hand it is to use race in school admissions or anything else is bothersome to some folks.

Blinded by rage after 9/11, Mark Anthony Stroman shot three men he thought were Arabs. In the process he murdered a Muslim from Pakistan and a Hindu immigrant from India. He also shot Rais Bhuiyan at close range, putting 38 pellets into his face, robbing Bhuiyan of sight in one eye. Now this victim,...
Read More »

Christians in Alabama and Georgia are stepping forward to defend undocumented immigrants against harsh new laws aimed against them. The new Alabama law—widely considered the nation’s most restrictive state law against illegal immigration—prohibits, among other provisions, providing transportation to illegal immigrants, requires schools to check the immigration status of students and report their findings...
Read More »

Critics of the market, from Marx and Karl Polanyi to Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, Robert Putnam, and some contemporary sociologists, decry the anonymity of commercial relations. Strong, local, community ties, they complain, are being displaced by long-distance, ad hoc, impersonal, weak ties. ”Increasingly,” writes anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, “we commoditize things, leisure, body parts, reproductive capacities,...
Read More »

Like millions of families this month, we attended a commencement ceremony this past weekend, at Mills College, a liberal arts college for women in California. Mills was founded as the Young Ladies’ Seminary, and a few years later was bought by missionaries Cyrus and Susan Mills, who relocated it to Oakland and directed its...
Read More »

In the 2009 “Nation’s Report Card” of students’ achievement, by state, produced by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, Californian students ranked 49th in reading—ahead only of Hawaii and the District of Columbia—and above only Mississippi in science. One would think that those kind of statistics would focus all attention on...
Read More »

Spike Lee has reminded us of his longtime, and all too predictable, belief that Cleopatra was black on the occasion of Liz Taylor’s funeral. This instantly brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s pithy retort to similar claims by W.E.B. DuBois: “I resent his putting that Greek slut, Cleopatra, into the same race as me.”