Salon.com > Robert Kennedy

How to talk about white people

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:26:00 +0000

When I wrote “What’s the Matter With White People?” I chose the title for its many meanings. Talking about it during last fall’s election season, when 90 percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were white, however, only one meaning came through: What’s the matter with the GOP, that it has become, essentially, the party of white people? Less attention focused on the flip side of that question: Why were Democrats having a harder time with white voters, and what if anything could they do to change that?

With President Obama embarked on his second term, and Democrats seeing their future in the alliance of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, college-educated women and young people he assembled, I sometimes find myself asking “What’s the matter with white people?” in a different way – as in, “don’t they have a place in this new multiracial coalition?” As whites become just one of several American minorities in the near future -- brown babies already outnumber white babies in the nation’s nurseries – I’ve been thinking more about the ways language can ease our transition to a multiracial America. The paperback version of my book comes out April 16 – you can pre-order it here -- and I got to take on a lot of these post-election thoughts in an afterword.

Sequestration nation and RFK

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:21:00 +0000

With the sequester now beginning, I find myself thinking about Robert F. Kennedy — and 46 years ago when I was an intern in his Senate office.

1967 was a difficult time for the nation. America was deeply split over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Many of our cities were burning. The war was escalating.

But RFK was upbeat. He was also busy and intense — drafting legislation, lining up votes, speaking to the poor, inspiring the young. I was awed by his energy and optimism, and his overriding passion for social justice and the public good. (Within a few months he’d declare his intention to run for president. Within a year he’d be dead.)

The nation is once again polarized, but I don’t hear our politicians talking about social justice or the public good. They’re talking instead about the budget deficit and sequestration.

At bottom, though, the issue is still social justice.

The austerity economics on which we’ve embarked is a cruel hoax — cruel because it hurts those who are already hurt the most; a hoax because it doesn’t work.

Robert F. Kennedy: Warren Commission “a shoddy piece of craftsmanship”

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:06:00 +0000

Almost 50 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, add another name to the list of Warren Commission skeptics -- the president's brother, then attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.

At a panel discussion in Dallas this weekend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that while his dad supported the Warren Commission's official conclusion in public, he told friends and family that the lone gunman theory left too many unanswered questions in his mind.

“In private, he was dismissive of it,” Kennedy said. “My father believed the Warren report was a shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”

The Warren Commission concluded that the only shooter on Dallas' Dealey Plaza that November 1963 morning was Lee Harvey Oswald. Conspiracy theorists for years have argued with its findings, seeing possible evidence of a second shooter on the "grassy knoll," and doubting Oswald was enough of a marksman to make the shot from several floors up in the Texas School Book Depository. Others have noted Oswald's years living in Russia, or wondered if the assassination may have carried the fingerprints of Cuba or organized crime in America.