Making Black Lives Matter

The St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to return an indictment of police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown was at once appalling and entirely predictable. Grand juries usually defer to the will of the prosecutors who marshal the cases on their dockets, and Bob McCulloch, the district attorney in the Brown case, has a long track record of siding with the police over his twenty-five-year career. This, too, can hardly come as a shock, given his strong ties to the law-enforcement community: McCulloch’s father, brother, and cousin were all St. Louis police officers,

politics Feb/Mar 2013

Cat Power

For years it’s been said in circles both polite and impolite, and in ways both delicate and indelicate, that America’s blacks should learn to live more like America’s Jews. Writing in the Jewish Journal in 2006, the black former New York Times reporter Eric Copage said he once asked himself “if there were things Jews do that blacks should adopt to become more prosperous.” “My answer,” he continued, “an emphatic yes.”

Unpacking what it means to “act Jewish” is certainly a task to which entire volumes—to say nothing of countless Woody Allen bits—have been devoted. But in general, when people