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Charlottesville, Va., Is About Choosing Who We Want to Be as a Nation
A year ago I went to visit the farm, located east of Charlottesville, Va., where my grandmother’s grandfather Phil was born enslaved to the Parrish family. Phil (born in 1852); his mother, Rachel (1828); and his wife, Susan (1860), were in this country when most white Americans’ ancestors were still in Europe, but they weren’t…
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Obama Should Fight for Jobs as He Fights for Syria
If the Obama administration applied the same energy toward policies to reduce poverty and create jobs that it has toward making a case for military intervention in Syria, we might see an uptick in the economy, Jamal Simmons argues at U.S. News & World Report. Americans are still in distress and the president should marshal…
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Black Folks, We Better Get Moving
(The Root) — Last week I moderated a panel on 3-D printing at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, where two CEOs offered insights into this technology that has the potential to disrupt gun safety, manufacturing and possibly the geopolitical relationships between countries. On another panel, a 16-year-old winner of the Intel Science Fair Grand Prize…
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Bringing the Internet Home
(Special to The Root) — The Internet has changed America perhaps even more profoundly than the telegraph, television or Motown Records. Much the way these earlier innovations shrank the spaces between Americans and unleashed new market forces, access to broadband has opened up a whole new way of doing business that crosses lines of culture…
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Romney Underestimated Obama
Jamal Simmons writes at U.S. News & World Report that Mitt Romney’s failure to anticipate the president’s impressive debate performance in the “rock ’em, sock ’em” exchange was typical of the GOP. Republicans often underestimate Obama and it seems Romney fell into that trap … The former Massachusetts governor wasn’t ready to handle the jabs…
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A Personal Reality Check on the 47 Percent
At Politico, political commentator Jamal Simmons says that we need a president who understands families like his, who had to work hard to keep things together. Surely, among the 47 percent of Americans that Romney lumped into the victim or dependent category in his secretly taped remarks are parents of kids like me. There were…
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The Conservative Nonsense Attacks on Common
Conservatives on Fox News are spending this week attacking the White House for inviting the rapper-poet Common to the White House for a poetry reading last night. They are upset with Common for poetry he recited on the TV show Def Poetry Jam, targeting President Bush for taking us to war in Iraq and not…
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How Obama Can Win Again
As a writer himself, President Obama surely understands the advice a writer friend once gave me: Sometimes you have to drown your own kittens, no matter how cute. The metaphor, while a bit unsettling, makes a key point. However attached one might be to an idea, sometimes you have to hit the delete button for…
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Stealing Obama's Candy
On summer afternoons in the Dexter-Davison neighborhood of Detroit where I grew up, my brothers and I would return from the party store around the corner from our house with snacks of sugar-filled goodies. My older brother Che favored “Now and Laters,” while I preferred Faygo Red Pop (65 cents a bottle) and Jay’s Red…
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The Clinton-Obama Mash-up
In music, they call laying the lyrics from one song over music from a different genre a “mash-up.” My favorite example is “Collision Course,” the effort from rock group Linkin Park and Jay-Z that resulted in the song “Numb/Encore,” used in the 2006 movie re-make of Miami Vice. Like these “mash-ups” that take two songs…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
