Politicians love to attack the media. It feeds their own egos to attack the messenger rather than to adjust the message. It also can make the public look more favorably upon you if they believe that you are being unfairly targeted by other people. This adage has been especially true running up [...]

One of the problems with overcoming bias is the problem of changing common knowledge. The best example I’ve seen is a classic Family Ties episode, in which the neighbors panic because a black family moves onto the block. As soon as the black family moves in, several families leave the neighborhood because of [...]

Another great article on race came out today, this one talking about racial discrimination in sports. The author, LZ Granderson, describes his infuriation at the stereotypes that continue to taint our perception of great athletes. In a nutshell: if you want to say that black guys can be great QBs, then you also [...]

“He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who [...]

This morning Barack Obama gave a wonderful speech on race in America, specifically confronting the controversy surrounding some statements made by his pastor. If you haven’t watched the speech or read the text, I would recommend that you do so. In particular, I applaud Obama for attempting to do two extremely difficult things.

I was flipping through the news channels yesterday, when I came across the following banner: Steinem: Racism Taken More Seriously Than Sexism. Unfortunately, the commentators had already moved on to rehash the already stale arguments about the role of “identity politics” in the Democratic Primary. As a result, I have no idea if [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hillary Clinton lately. Some of this has stemmed from our recent debate about media coverage of the Clinton campaign. Some of it has come from Stanley Fish’s recent columns over on his New York Times blog. In any case, the upshot has been that I’ve been [...]

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve spent a lot more time lately talking about the GOP primary than the Democratic primary. Mostly this is because the Democratic primary has been pretty uninteresting lately. Clinton is obviously the front-runner, Obama the contender, and Edwards the dark horse. The differences between the candidates largely come [...]

Lately I’ve been comparing the different primary debates. I was originally prompted by criticism about the CNN/YouTube GOP debate last week, in which CNN took heavy criticism for having biased questions and biased questioners. (In case you are curious, yes some of the questioners themselves had loose connections to Democratic campaigns, but the [...]

In his New York Times editorial today, David Brooks argues that American society has become increasingly splintered along racial and ethnic lines. The bulk of his evidence comes from the world of music. He notes that the artists and audience for rock bands is increasingly white-only, and that as a result modern rock [...]