Race
I hesitate to help stir the pot of manufactured racial strife, but the prominent black academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard has illustrated too perfectly why racial division will persist until such “leaders” of minority communities as him begin arguing, by example, for mutual empathy. Gates returned from a research trip to find that…
Brian Wilder conveys an interesting and timely history lesson on slavery in Rhode Island, but he ends with a peculiar conclusion: Today it is strange, and perhaps convenient, how little most of us know about the extent of Rhode Island’s involvement in slavery. The least we can do is to dump a word that lost…
Keith Stokes adds some welcome historical perspective to the manufactured controversy about the last word in the state’s official name — Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: The historic use of the word plantation does not simply refer to early farms or settlements. It was specifically crafted and applied by our founding settlers as a means…
Race is not purely a matter of hue. Evidence from sports aptitude to facial bone structure proves it to be so, and denying that fact in the name of racial harmony makes it more difficult to solidify the cultural holding that the differences don’t matter in a philosophical or legal context. It may also make…
This Sonia Sotomayor quote from a 2001 lecture at the Berkeley School of Law has been getting a lot of attention…I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.…but as Peter Kirsanow…
And “post-racial” America continues to live up to its billing: A divided Supreme Court took up its first examination of race in the Obama era yesterday, wrestling with claims of job discrimination by white firefighters in a case that could force changes in employment practices nationwide. The New Haven case pits white firefighters, who showed…
Sometimes, one reads statements that leave the impression that the center line of American politics is a portal from one reality — with its own intellectual and moral standards — and another. Among the (predictable) criticisms being directed toward the Providence tea party is that the vast majority of those in attendance were light skinned,…
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was established by Royal Charter in 1663: Because titles to these lands rested only on Indian deeds, neighboring colonies began to covet them. To meet this threat, Roger Williams journeyed to England and secured a parliamentary patent in March 1643-44 uniting the four towns into a single colony and confirming…
The Coen Brothers’ 2007 film No Country For Old Men revolves around the tale of several young men engaged in a violent race for a satchel of cash. Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging sheriff investigating the depressing trail of bloodshed, markings that inform the old man that the customs and morals that guided his…
The left’s investment in identity politics has proven to reap rewards. In battling the concept that people should develop their senses of self in such a way as to deemphasize a relative superficiality like ethnicity, the planners and plotters and goers-along cleared the field for such results as this: Political and sociological analysts in several…