Racism

When Maplewood city council candidate Jim Llanas told the Minnesota Independent this summer, “Brace yourself. It’s just going to get ugly,” he wasn’t far off the mark. An anonymous flier being distributed about Llanas, who would be both the first openly gay and the first Hispanic city council member in the city’s history, is being described as racist and homophobic by a progressive group and a city council member.

The National Socialist Movement, a homophobic and anti-semitic white supremacist group, is threatening to protest a workshop at the Minneapolis YWCA about white privilege and white supremacy. It will be the first public NSM event here since a 2007 book-burning, and several groups of Twin Citians say they plan to make that visit an unwelcome [...]

Deborah Hedlund, a candidate for the Minnesota Supreme Court, received an anti-Muslim email from a campaign vendor, Matt Look, that said, “Can Muslims Be Good Americans?” the Pioneer Press reports. The email continued, “Perhaps we should be suspicious of all Muslims in this country. They obviously cannot be both ‘good’ Muslims and good Americans. … [...]

Al Jazeera English recently traveled to Ohio to ask voters to share thoughts on Sen. Barack Obama. What they found were wildly inaccurate and often racist beliefs about the Illinois Democrat:
“I’m afraid if he wins, the black will take over.”
“He’s not a Christian. This is a Christian nation!”
“He must support terrorists.”
“I’m concerned Obama and his [...]

A pair of pieces from The Washington Post demonstrate in detail the dilemma the Republican ticket faces and how Gov. Sarah Palin has set about solving it. Life in Michigan has flatlined along with the economy, leading folks to vote Democratic — while at a rally in Clearwater, Fla., Palin gets the crowd riled with her “kind of rough” rhetoric. Links, quotes and video from a rally that got ugly after the jump.

In CNN exit polls conducted last night in Kentucky, about 21 percent of voters said race played a factor in their decision. Nine out of 10 of those voted for Clinton, according to the exit polls. CNN political analyst David Gergen discusses the data (below) and begs an important question: “What if Hillary Clinton were [...]

A discrimination lawsuit against the US Secret Service that’s been wending its way through the courts for the past eight years has produced, among other things, an embarrassing trail of racist jokes and remarks in Secret Service email files. And today David Johnston of the New York Times writes that one of the supervisors implicated [...]

While some of its local sympathizers are likely to stick around, the country’s largest remaining neo-Nazi group has officially pulled up stakes in Minnesota: the Hitler-inspired National Socialist Movement (NSM) has left its longtime Minneapolis headquarters and relocated to Michigan, according to a press release dated Dec. 29.
NSM head Jeff Schoep moved from Hutchinson to [...]