For about a year, I worked for 'Daily Kos.' They were great. I mean, they allowed me to write whatever I was thinking about and feeling. 'The New York Daily News' saw it. They were making some pretty big changes. They hired a new editor in chief. I was his first hire.
Politicians and lawmakers are willing to watch us take us a knee, watch us march, watch us picket and protest - and wait us out. They are willing and prepared to outlast us - and, in most cases, to do absolutely nothing about the problems we highlight and amplify.
Anne Marie Schubert is one of the most horrible district attorneys in the state of California. She represents Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. It's no wonder she continuously refuses to hold the police accountable for violence against people of color.
Boston's justice system is in serious need of reform. Many of its policies and practices are antiquated, expensive, and don't really even make Boston safer.
Electing radical reformers as district attorneys is huge. It's essential.
We must put an end to the corruption and systemic racism in our justice system, and that starts by electing progressive district attorneys who will fight for real justice across the country.
As you may know, I'm the co-founder of a political organization called Real Justice. Our goal is to help elect progressive, reform-minded prosecutors and district attorneys that are committed to ending mass incarceration.
'The Star-Spangled Banner' should've never been made into our national anthem. That President Woodrow Wilson, widely thought to be one of the most bigoted presidents ever elected, chose it as our national anthem, is painfully telling as well.
Racism itself is difficult to measure. We can measure hate crimes - which are absolutely an indicator. We can measure reports of discrimination. We can measure the number of times hateful words are being used across the Internet. Those things all help us measure racism, but it can sometimes be nebulous.
I reject this idea that who Bernie Sanders was in the 1960s is irrelevant. Who you are and what you do, what you fought for, and who and what you fought against, is always relevant.
While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone-cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation-owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it.
Donald Trump is a bigot.
The harsh fact of the matter is that this nation has not remotely come to grips with how many of its laws are rooted in slavery and bigoted oppression. After the Civil War, the United States never said, 'Let's examine every law and policy and system and structure we have to evaluate whether or not they were created as a tools of oppression.'
I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man.
There is a movement we call Afro-Futurism, where we imagine a black way of life free of white supremacy and bigotry. 'Black Panther,' I think, is the first blockbuster film centered in the ethos of Afro-Futurism, where the writers and directors and makeup and wardrobe team all imagined a beautiful, thriving black Africa without colonialism.
'Black Panther' had a whole cast of beautiful black brilliance. Black scientists. Black presidents. The style. The technology. The color.
When you're trying to bust through the noise on social media, you do have to be overt and loud.
Because of tax laws governing charities, including almost every single civil rights organization you've ever heard of, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the ACLU, and others, those organizations are not allowed to endorse political candidates or use their resources in political campaigns of any kind.
We live in a country where movies, music, and sports are more important than God to a lot of people. It's why Colin Kaepernick's protest rocked the nation and got the whole world talking. Taking a knee is a simple act of defiance. Had Colin done it anywhere other than the football field, it might not have even made the news.
When I travel and speak across the country, I often tell college students that we are making a significant mistake when we say to each other that this criminal justice of ours is broken. To say it's broken would be to suggest that it was well designed and had good intentions from the start.
