The Littlest Schoolhouse
Brainy but easily distracted, the author barely made it through high school and dropped out of…
- Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
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The ex-slave abolitionist icon Frederick Douglass once proclaimed, "Where justice is denied...where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." What a sick irony to realize that the first man sharing Douglass' race to occupy the Oval Office embodies the very dark spirit of oppression that generations of black Americans suffered to overcome, and that if left unchallenged, threatens the lives and liberties of all men...Appallingly, this slavish mindset is not only accepted by America's first black president, it is celebrated. On the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that overturned precedent in all 50 states and ushered in a return of the plantation owners' ideology, Barack Obama took the time to honor its legacy....Only a man terrifyingly unmoved by the injustices perpetrated against his own ancestors could, just a century and a half later, facilitate even worse atrocities without a hint of remorse. Intellectual honesty demands that we face a harsh and uncomfortable reality: Barack Obama -- our first black president -- has chosen to take up the whip against his fellow man. By doing so, he carves out an eternal legacy for himself far removed from the dignified halls of honor reserved for those with the moral courage to defend the defenseless. By instead regarding them as subhuman, Obama wars against the life work of Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln.
Brainy but easily distracted, the author barely made it through high school and dropped out of…
Saving hallowed ground from a Big Box invader
When Michelle Obama told a Milwaukee campaign rally last February, "For the first time in my adult…