Robert Huber's front page Philadelphia Magazine article entitled 'Being White In Philly' says a lot about the values and sensibilities of the bourgeois press in this city. We wonder how such a spiteful and ugly article made its way not only through the editing process but onto the front page of a "prestigious" Philadelphia magazine.

This month, over twenty students enrolled in the “Dismantling Racism” class offered by St. Catherine University in Minnesota traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area. The class focused primarily on California’s prisons and what anti-prison activists are doing to challenge the human rights violations and racism endemic to California’s infamous prison system.  

Black defendants are assigned greater bail levels than whites accused of similar offenses. To investigate whether this difference can be explained without taste-baseddiscrimination, we construct a simple model of optimal bail setting. We develop a two-step econometric method that allows us to estimate the model while holding constant defendant heterogeneity that judges can observe, even when we do not. In return for making the behavioral model’s relatively weak parametric assumptions, we are able to allow an arbitrary conditional distribution of such heterogeneity.

The Black Panther Party.  They built free clinics.  The fed children.  They educated themselves and a myriad of others.  The kept an eye on the police.  They picked up the gun to defend themselves and their people.  They influenced an untold number of peopple.  They scared the beejeezus  out of the oppresors and the explooiters, the racists, and, yes, the pigs.  They stood tall.  They were targeted by COINTELPRO,  attacked, shot, jailed, murdered.  They withstood it and they led.  The Black Panther Party.

Hopefully you have heard of Anne Braden.   As described by the Anne Braden Institute, she, "...  was a racial justice organizer and journalist, whose outlook was global but whose activism was concentrated at the grassroots level."   In the 1950's, she was indicted on charges of sedition in a famous case after she helped buy a house for a black family in an all-white suburb of Louisville, Ky.  Anne was one of the first white southerners singled out for praise by Martin Luther King and aptly so.

From behind the enemy lines of the California state prison system, from within the belly of the beast – that is the Amerikan injustice system – I greet you all and call your attention to the annual commemoration of Black August. I invite you, fellow prisoners and families throughout Amerika, to join us in honoring our beloved martyrs with fasting, study, sharing Panther love and knowledge in the spirit of our fallen comrades and Trayvon Martin, killed by a racist vigilante in Sanford, Fla., in February and Kendrec McDade, killed by racist cops in Pasadena, Calif., in March. 

Trayvon Martin had it coming, or so we will soon be led to believe. The surely unattractive details of his short life as a black man in America will tumble forward—his troubles in school, the weed baggie that got him suspended, the altercation in which police and George Zimmerman claim he was the aggressor. He was a maladjusted, Negro man-child, so ferocious he could kill an armed man with his bare hands. He had to die.

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to come up with an adequate definition of it. Yet the social and political effects of race are very real. Race is like a dollar bill—a human creation rather than a fact of nature that has value only because people say it does. And like money, people give race “value” because it serves a function in society. That function in the United States is to suppress class conflict.

Early last week a bit of cheery news was reported by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank: black segregation has hit its lowest point in more than a century — declining in all 85 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas. In a stunning turn of events, we are told that "ghetto neighborhoods have witnessed profound population decline, as former residents decamp for the suburbs."

MILWAUKEE—Wisconsin’s economic problems are only deepening the political crisis for Gov. Scott Walker, already the target of a massive recall campaign that gathered 1.1 signatures from Wisconsinites. Despite Walker’s pledge to preside over the creation of 250,000 jobs by 2015, Wisconsin has lost jobs for the past six months as the rest of the country has added them, and job losses have totaled more than 35,000 since he signed his highly controversial state budget last June.