Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in August and September of 2005, upending the lives of 1.5 million people and putting Black folks’ lack of political and social power front and center for all the world to see.

The storms magnified racial disparities in the U.S., and no place demonstrated this more clearly than New Orleans, where 80% of the city was submerged after Katrina.

This has got to be my all-time favorite excuse for racist behavior EVER. “I wasn’t insulting black people, I was insulting Asian people! Also people with ears, as regards the Linkin Park thing. What, that’s no cool anymore?”

No wonder the modern GOP hates science…it makes sense.

Newt Gingrich has repeatedly made comment that denigrate poor people but are little more than racist and classist stereotypes and dog whistles. This open letter by Joi Ruth Orr, Director of Organizing, Faith Leaders for Community Change, calling for an apology from Mr. Gingrich, needs to be spread far and wide.

Not involving a leather-slave and gravy condensed down to two minutes. In the State where the Civil War began (and yes, they started it) a white guy beats up on a black guy while a bunch of self-justifying and aggrieved white people cheer and boo. What could be a better image on MLK day?

So in essence, what I’d just read was yet another exercise in punching hippies (particularly straw hippies) in order to try and somehow equate progressives (i.e., the people who so far have been right about pretty much everything) with Tea Party members, and with a nice steaming chunk of juicy “you hate Obama ‘cuz you’re white!” race-baiting tossed in, which is ironic as hell because some of the most biting critics of Obama are in fact African-Americans.

In a stinging report, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released their findings of a two-year investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, showing that he unfairly targeted Latinos and discriminated against them at the expense of other crimes in his jurisdiction, including sexual assault crimes.

At Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church in Pike County, Kentucky, an inter-racial couple, Stella Harville, who is white and who was baptized there and a member of the church as a child, brought her fiancé, Ticha Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe, to sing at a service. Then they were banned.

Times change, the approach skews a bit, but at its vestigial-heart National Review remains the go-to source for the same ol’ racist claptrap.

How is it that Americans—consumers of the most media in the world—remain so misinformed about so many fundamental issues? How much does this phenomenon relate to the content offered by the news media? How much of mass media’s content is related to the political structures such as ownership, the law, and the organizations’ own goals? News for All The People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media examines this issue within two contexts – history and race.