When President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday, he suggested that race ceases to matter to those who serve in the armed forces. "When you put on that uniform, it doesn't matter if you're black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight," he said. "When you're marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you're in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one nation, leaving no one behind."

But tell that to the families of Private Danny Chen of New York City and Lance Corporal Harry Lew, 21, of Santa Clara, Calif., and you're likely to hear a very different point of view. Both Chen, 19, and Lew committed suicide after fellow soldiers bullied them. White soldiers reportedly taunted Chen repeatedly with racial slurs such as "gook," "chink" and "dragon lady." Chen wrote to family members that, "They ask if I'm from China a few times a day. They also called out my name, 'Chen,' in a goat-like voice sometimes for no reason." Moreover, the New York Times reports that after Chen neglected to turn a water heater off one night, soldiers dragged him out of bed and threw rocks at him. Read More...

Conspiracy. Excessive Force. Obstruction of justice. These are just some of the crimes federal investigators Tuesday charged members of the East Haven police force in Connecticut with. What's even more shocking about the charges is that they allegedly stem from a pattern of racial profiling and mistreatment of Hispanic immigrants by police. The New York Times reports:

"They stopped and detained people, particularly immigrants, without reason...sometimes slapping, hitting or kicking them when they were handcuffed, and once smashing a man's head into a wall. They followed and arrested residents, including a local priest, who tried to document their behavior. They rooted through stores looking for damning security videotapes of how they had treated some of their targets, described by one of them on a police radio as having 'drifted to this country on rafts made of chicken wings.'" Read More...

"We got a black president before we got a black action movie," says Aaron McGruder, co-writer of the Tuskegee Airmen blockbuster "Red Tails," which just opened in theaters.

Although African Americans have starred in an assortment of action films--from "Independence Day" to "Glory"--"Red Tails" stands out as the rare action film with an all-black cast. Whites have no major roles in the World War II movie about the U.S. military's first black aerial combat team. Read More...

Almost 44 years after his 1968 assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as more of a legend than a man. He's largely recognized for leading the charge to end Jim Crow in the United States, but his opposition to the Vietnam War, support of labor unions and view that poor people had rights are largely overlooked.

If King were running for office today, he'd likely be labeled an anti-American socialist because of his political beliefs. But because his perspectives on morality, war, poverty and so forth are frequently ignored on the federal holiday in his honor, it's easy to reduce him to being a harmless and saint-like practitioner of nonviolence. On the contrary, King's political agenda made him very dangerous. He not only opposed war and racial segregation Read More...