Z Nightly Commentaries
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Recent Z Nightly Commentaries
Jamal: Health Care
Sep 03, 2009
As the White House and Congress square off on health care, take care, because the deals with the big dogs have been made -- and the people will be -- once again -- left holding an empty bag.
Jamal: San Francisco 8
Jul 30, 2009
It's been 2 1/2 years since the San Francisco 8 -- eight former members of the Black Panther Party -- were cast into California jails and threatened with life sentences stemming from the 1971 shooting of a cop.
Jensen: Teachable Moments
Jul 29, 2009
Honoring President Obama's request that the controversy involving a black Harvard University professor and a white Cambridge police officer become "a teachable moment," here's my contribution to an old lesson that we white people tend to be slow to learn.
Jensen: Getting Radicalized
Jul 16, 2009
My transition to political radicalism -- going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future -- involved a lot of pain, in two different ways.
Jamal: Hell
Jul 07, 2009
While a young reporter for a local NPR affiliate, housing was my beat...
Jensen: Independence
Jul 04, 2009
Power is typically approached as a question of dominance and submission. Power is marked by the ability to impose or the ability to resist that imposition. This is what some have called “power-over,†which assumes a zero-sum game in which individuals are always in competition for that power—someone dominates and someone submits. In such a world, one can use this kind of power with varying levels of responsibility to others, but in such a world it is inevitable that power routinely will be used unjustly. Because there is always the threat that some other person or group can grab the power, these kinds of systems will encourage people to seek always more power. This is readily evident, for example, in the emergence of the United States as the dominant power after World War II.
Jensen: Theology & Politics
Jun 20, 2009
My first venture into political activism was in the feminist movement to end men's violence against women and men's use of women in the sexual-exploitation industries (stripping, pornography, prostitution), grounded in a critique of the underlying conception of what it means to be a man that most of us have been socialized to accept: masculinity as a quest for control and domination, routinely leading to aggression and violence. Our understanding of what it means to be male has to change, and to drive home that point, I often offer this challenge to my brothers: "You can be a man, or you can be a human being."
Jensen: S.A. White Supremacy
Jun 14, 2009
"During apartheid the racism of white people was up front, and we knew what we were dealing with. Now white people smile at us, but for most black people the unemployment and grinding poverty and dehumanizing conditions of everyday life haven't changed," a black South African told me. "So, what kind of commitment to justice is under that smile?"
Jamal: Sotomayor
Jun 07, 2009
It would be easy to describe the present faux controversy over the nomination of 2nd Circuit of Appeals Court judge, Sonia Sotomayor, to the U.S. Supreme Court as media-generated, and thus, unreal.
Jamal: Power of Culture
May 28, 2009
For years now, scholars have tried to grasp and utilize the various tools of hip-hop to stimulate and educate American school students (perhaps especially urban youth) with various measures of success or failure, depending, of course, on who does the measuring.
Jamal: Turning Point
May 02, 2009
As these words are being written, the G20 meeting is taking place in the world's second major banking city (London), and US president Barack Obama has arrived with a retinue not seen since an imperial king visited his dominions in the hinterlands, to impress upon the rabble the power and splendor of Empire.
Jamal: Obama & L.A.
Apr 30, 2009
As U.S. President, Barack Obama treks to the Caribbean to sit and sup with Latin American leaders, he does so amidst a promise of a new relationship with America del Sur.
Jamal: World To Come
Apr 15, 2009
I'm always intrigued when talking heads rush to comfort their viewers with news that the economy is bouncing back because, for that day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average may be performing well.
Jamal: The Fallen
Mar 12, 2009
A nation's economy is always a work of complexity, which accounts for the divergent opinions of economists, who often come down on different sides of the big issues, as in what works, and what doesn't.
Jensen: Grief & Rage
Jan 13, 2009
We need to analyze and strategize about political realities, but let’s begin with an emotional reality: For the past few weeks the scenes from Gaza have been driving many of us mad.
Jamal: Post-Racial America?
Dec 26, 2008
There is a certain sense in the minds of millions in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, that we have reached the promised land.
Jamal: Somali Woes
Dec 23, 2008
On the coastal outcrops of East Africa, in an area known as 'the horn', Somalia sits like a sentinel jutting into both the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Jamal: More Money
Dec 16, 2008
As the nation's economy seesaws between bubble and bust, people are becoming more and more aware of the obscene levels of disproportion between average workers and their CEO's.
Jamal: Bailing Out
Dec 01, 2008
It's been over a month since the beginning of the bailout binge, and little, if anything has changed. For, the bailout, from its inception, has been little more than a bait and switch.
Sep 16, 2009
Journalism schools have much in common with the mainstream news media they traditionally serve. As the business model for conventional corporate journalism collapses and digital technologies reshape the media landscape, journalism schools struggle with parallel problems around curricula and personnel.