If the theory exists that an inevitable advance toward fuller democracy is often offset by periodic reversals that threaten to plunge the body politic into veritable civic chaos, then we are witnessing that kind of upheaval in our country currently.
When President Trump lost the presidency late last year, he left office on unequivocally belligerent terms. Trump swore he had been victimized by a conspiratorial voter cabal whose malfeasance proved his contention that corruption was endemic to our election process. …
Perhaps what we are witnessing in the aftermath of yesterday’s double Georgia U.S. Senate election run-offs is a political parable. Parables are stories that lead to revelation — or narratives that disclose elusive truths, but which make understanding more lucid. Political parables can tell us who we are as citizens and anticipate what possibilities are ahead.
The senate races in Georgia have, since the November 2020 elections, captured the attention of the nation in the soon to be post-Trump presidency. Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have functioned in their state — and across the nation — as representative…
The curious among us have assuredly asked: what is violence? Is it an obvious thing requiring no deep thinking to define it? Or is it more complex than that — more like an ideology marked by intractable worldviews, group histories, differing perspectives or the source of disparate social and political hierachies?
Some argue that violence is embedded in our DNA. Others contend its a learned behavior. The political philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his classic text, Moral Man and Immoral Society, has said that the quest humans have for elite status motivates violent propensities, contending also that: “The moral attitudes of…
The city of Boston was recently confronted with an opportunity to clear the racially toxic air that hovers over Faneuil Hall and its adjacent Market Place in Boston. What did the city do? It punted.
Earlier this month, the city cashed a 2.1 million check from the New York-based Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation. The corporation was two years late on its annual payment in-lieu-of-taxes agreement. The city had threatened to break the lease. Instead, they pressured the company and took the money.
Given the symbolic shame that Faneuil Hall brings to the city, there certainly was an opportunity to do more…
On a warm April day in 1899 W.E.B Dubois — the great scholar and Civil Rights advocate — waned in lugubrious despair as he glared through the widow of a grocery store in Atlanta to see the detached knuckles of Sam Hose on display in a jar. Hose had been lynched.
In 1998, James Byrd’s body parts were found splayed across the roads near Jasper, Texas after a trio of white men dragged his body three miles while in molten states of racial hatred. Byrd’s right arm and head were severed from his body.
In 2015, Freddie Gray, a Black…
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was fooling no one yesterday— especially Blacks in the city — when he stepped to the podium at city hall to suggest he was interested in addressing systemic racism.
Implicit in Walsh’s latest policy ploy is the intimation he has long been concerned about the festering presence of systemic racism that has been a fixture in his administration. Yesterday’s faux press conference focused on police department reform that stemmed from a stinging Boston Globe report this week that found the city woefully wanting around the issue of equity within the department’s ranks. At the hastily called…
Last night’s presidential debate was not a presidential debate at all. Instead it was cacophonous sound and fury signifying nothing. It was a 90-minute forum full of dispiriting pontifications where two candidates purporting a desire to lead the free world rolled in the mire before the media klieg lights, reducing themselves to acerbic chortling and noxious name calling. It was supposed to be a measured discourse between worthy opponents — an extended dignified discussion over national policies and statecraft. It was anything but that.
The millions of Americans who tuned in last night hoping to finalize their decision-making before November’s…
The Breonna Taylor ruling last week effectively allowed the police accused of her murder go uncharged for a horrendous crime that should not have ever happened.
The judicial farce was yet another example of bias against black lives that has become commonplace and that reinforces the stark racial divisions that characterize American political and civic culture. This historic racial division began in the poisoned womb of slavery and extends now into the final year of the first term of the Trump administration.
When the ruling was handed down — identifying that only one of the three Louisville police officers would…
President Donald Trump launched the Republican National Convention Monday with a laundry list of claims on how he has made American great again — especially for Black Americans. Much of his nearly hour long meandering over issues concerning African American well-being was sound and fury signifying nothing.
Among the most egregious of Trump pronouncements from Charlotte, North Carolina where a portion of the convention is be held are the achievement he touts about changing the climate of Black American since elected in 2016.
Of his promoted reforms on criminal justice Trump said: “It was us, us, together that criminal justice…
Daily Democratic National Convention Opinion Coverage in Sepia
Friday, August 21, 2020 Day 4 Coverage
Joe Biden last night began his party’s acceptance speech for the presidency with an homage to black leadership and an allusion to luminosity.
On black leadership he quoted Ella Baker, an unsung Civil Rights Movement strategist who was a functionary in the upper echelons of the the Reverend Martin Luther King’s South Christian Leadership Conference, which is credited for changing the racial regime of the South and leading to the demise Jim Crow. Baker is also known historically as the inspiration of SNCC, the Student…
Kevin Peterson is founder of the New Democracy Coalition and Convener of the Fanueil Hall Race and Reconciliation Project. He is a social and cultural critic.