Claims of an out-of-wedlock birth crisis and “babies having babies” are racist myths. It’s time to tell the truth. — Surely you’ve heard it before. The problem facing Black people isn’t racism; it’s girls and women having babies out of wedlock. Whenever someone mentions the issue of ongoing racial discrimination in America, the answer from conservatives always sounds like this. Bill O’Reilly said it in the early days of the…

Scott Adams doesn’t do math or social science nearly as well as bigotry — and now, he doesn’t do Dilbert either — Scott Adams, the one-time Trump-supporting creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has tanked his career. In the last few days, Adams’s strip was pulled from over 300 newspapers, his syndicator dropped him, and he lost a book deal with his publisher. And all because of his idiotic interpretation of an…

The presence of legal equality doesn’t disprove the existence of institutionalized injustice — Of all the arguments made by conservatives to debunk the existence of institutional racism, one stands out above the rest as the most idiotic of them all. I’m sure you’ve come across it. It sounds like this: Institutional racism is a myth because, unlike during segregation, there are no laws…

With apologies to my compatriots on the left, for some folks, only prison will do — As I write this, supporters of recently-defeated Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro have finally been removed from that nation’s Congress building, Supreme Court, and Presidential palace. They had to be removed because over the weekend they decided to storm all three. Of course they did. As with their ideological contemporaries in…

Those who oppose social stigma for offensive behavior rarely offer alternatives, because they really don’t mind the bigotry — I’m not a fan of cancel culture. For most people who say or do foul things, including those that are racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or in any way injurious, I believe in the capacity for redemption. As someone who has met with death row inmates and believes that even most…

The Little MAGA Prince is lying again — because stoking white resentment is the family brand now — Donald Trump Jr., much like the man whose morally compromised seed produced him, is a liar, a con man — utterly and irredeemably full of shit. Although this much is obvious and hardly worth noting, there is something about saying it which never fails to satisfy. But my reasons for…

It says a lot that no white contractor in Virginia was willing to remove Confederate statues. None of what it says is good. — Do you have any idea just how racist a person has to be to turn down money if accepting it might serve the cause of racial justice? I mean, think about it. People like money. And you can’t blame them. Money is really helpful. Unlike with, say, cryptocurrency, you can…

At the very least it can demonstrate how racism shapes our perception of human worth — This is a thought experiment in two parts. Here’s the first. It’s 1942, and a small group of Jewish prisoners at Dachau have stolen some surplus weapons from a shed when the guards weren’t looking, and the door was unlocked. They’ve hidden the guns near the outer edge of the…

But your history textbook didn’t teach you that. Wonder why? — As we’ve learned from recent battles over how American schools should teach about the history of racism, many white folks steadfastly reject the idea that white supremacy is deeply ingrained in that history and has shaped the nation as we know it. To understand how something so obvious can be…