Editor's Note: This op-ed originally appeared in the South Florida Sun Sentinel and has been republished in its entirety with permission from the author. ‍ This November, Florida voters have the chance to expand the voting rights of all registered voters by supporting “All Voters Vote” — Amendment 3. As a Black woman and a physician who grew up in the social isolation of poverty in the Black community of South Philadelphia, I support Joe Biden’s decision to choose Kamala Harris as his running...

“The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the (European) past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening the concept to include black men.”-  James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" From the founding onward, race has been the American fulcrum, the nexus by which the country is united or divided, with the African American community pivotal in the long struggle for a broad-based inclusive American democracy. Race and place perpet...

In these times of mounting national and international crisis --  from poverty to climate change -- a lesson that emerges from studying how liberal democracies fail is condensed in a few words noted in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, “rights” are only relevant “between equals in power." The Declaration of Independence declares a right to equality, but the reality of inequality for the powerless remains. The great task of the independent political movement is to empower the American people to fr...