— “One of the most pernicious forms of racial discrimination and injustice in the United States criminal justice system is the racially-motivated use of prosecutorial peremptory challenges during the jury selection process,” said Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., the president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. “Black Americans and other people of color are systematically removed from juries by prosecutors because of their race and skin color."

In its filing, the Justice Department called the scoring system “vague and elusory.” In its press release, it said that the university “scores Asian-American applicants lower on the personal rating than white applicants.” According to the university, the personal rating is meant to reflect on a “wide range of applicant information or applicant information, such as personal essays, which Harvard uses to understand the applicant’s full life story.”

Trump says "there were very fine people on both sides" at the Charlottesville White nationalists rally, during a Trump Tower press conference. Never mind that one of the largest gatherings of racists in America since the end of the Civil Rights Movement occurred only eight months into Trump’s presidency. Put that aside. Trump’s “both sides” comments on who was to blame for the public street fight in the college town was all anyone needed to understand regarding the thinking of America’s 45th president on the issue of race.

As the presidential race heated up, Ho says his friend (whose name Ho asked be withheld for privacy reasons) began to echo some of the more toxic rhetoric coming out of the Trump campaign. It began with comments about undocumented immigrants, or about women. Over time, their meetings grew more tense, their differences more stark. “At some point there was no logical basis to our conversations – they just became a clash of values,” says Ho. “They never ended well.” 

Indeed, if political correctness was an effort to police offensive language in institutional settings – in school, at the workplace, in the media – the backlash against such restrictions is a kind of bacchanalian road rage that took root in cyberspace and is now in full bloom on and off line. It is as if, constrained in real life, America’s id knee-jerked itself into virtual space, making a permanent home there.

When GOP presidential contender Donald Trump shouts that he’s the “law-and-order candidate,” he is pilfering the line that George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton worked to death during their White House bids. The law-and-order line is heavy with racially coded images of rampant black crime, and this is a surefire way to pander to fearful suburban whites.

City, state and federal agencies have been stepping up efforts to stamp out fraudulent mortgage practices that target communities of color, pricing discrimination and redlining among them. Redlining, the practice of denying credit to qualified applicants who seek loans for homes in specific neighborhoods, is illegal under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, a Buffalo-area bank on September 10 agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges it redlined a large, predominantly black community in that city.

At the end of this year’s U.S. Supreme Court session, the highest ruling body in the land handed down a decision that put a major American retailer on the wrong side of the law. In 2008, a young Muslim woman interviewed for a sales position at Abercrombie & Fitch and, after being recommended for hire by the interviewer, was denied the position because she did not conform to the company’s “look policy,” which states certain rules on attire and appearance that its employees must follow. One 

Arguing that every citizen should have the right to vote, Clinton argued the common sense position that we should do what we can to make voting easier, not make it harder. She called for restoring the Voting Rights Act, to ensure pre-screening of election law changes that potentially discriminate against classes of voters. She embraced the bipartisan presidential commission recommendations for expanding early absentee and mail voting and for ensuring that no one waits more than 30 minutes to cast a vote.

It does not take long for an outsider visiting South Africa for the first time to observe the racial divide that still exists.  Many of the types of places created by the segregation of Apartheid—such as the townships consisting of makeshift residences constructed with corrugated tin—still exist, some only a short distance from the major urban centers of big cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town.  A trip to one of the upscale malls that are appearing all over the country is unlikely to paint an accurate picture of diversity for travelers.