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'Mad Men' Is Not About Us
Mad Men is certainly not a show in which black people can enjoy seeing people who look like them. As marvelous as the show has become over four seasons, for a black person it can be almost chilling to see one’s own color only in the occasional elevator operator, handyman or passerby. Or mugger. Or…
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Empty Seat Next to Me? I Wish!
By John McWhorter I am mystified by John Edgar Wideman’s account in The New York Times about how people on the Amtrak Acela train don’t take the seat next to him until it’s practically the only seat left. I am mystified not because I haven’t heard plenty of claims of this kind. I am mystified…
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Adrian Fenty's Charm Deficit
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s loss in Washington, D.C., last week was a crying shame. Black wiser heads muse about how the system prevents black people from voting “their interests” — Harvard Law’s Lani Guinier comes to mind — and yet black D.C. residents kicked out a mayor who, along with schools chief Michelle Rhee, was making…
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Obama Can Take Care of Himself
I presume we all agree that Newt Gingrich’s latest charge against our president is so absurd that it doesn’t even deserve comment. Obama has a “Kenyan” worldview he drank in from his father when his father barely even knew him? The statement is based on stunning ignorance about the basics of Obama’s biography, and willful…
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The Evolution of Blacks on TV
Regina King’s complaint about blacks being short-shrifted by the Emmys has me thinking about progress as well as obstacles. She’s right to complain that only about one in 20 top acting nominations for the Emmys has been for a non-white. It’s the invisibility problem — not what I personally term “racism,” but a definite legacy…
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Why the DEA Needs Ebonics Translators
For all the talk about what a subtle business the n-word is, the concept of Ebonics is just as tricky. And in the wake of the theatrically pat culmination of the Dr. Laura drama — her exiting stage right — here we are grappling with the Drug Enforcement Administration sending out a call for Ebonics…
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Let's Make a Deal on the N-Word
It’s a delicate business to declare a racial slur taboo. Today a non-black person calling a black one the n-word is treated as morally equivalent to photos of naked children being discovered in one’s desk drawer. Yet all societies have taboos, and the way we now treat the n-word is, in broad view, merely a…
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Free the Black Looney Tunes!
This week, Warner Home Video is releasing two more in its majestic series of DVD sets of Looney Tunes, cleaned up to look more gorgeous than you could ever have imagined if you grew up watching them on TV. However, out of roughly a thousand Looney Tunes, we will not be seeing a certain Censored…
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Why a Conversation on Race Is Not Enough
It’s good music, this idea once again in the air in the wake of L’affaire Sherrod — that America needs to have a “conversation” about race, or that America is culpable in that it won’t happen. I’ve always been especially stimulated by the corollary that often comes with the call for “conversation”: that America needs…
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An Antidote to the 'Acting White' Phenomenon: Segregated Schools?
The response to my Bloggingheads conversation with Stanford Law’s Richard Thompson Ford on the ”acting white” issue is making me feel old. My entree into the race debate was in my 2000 book, Losing the Race, where I argued that a crucial reason for the gap in scholarly performance between even middle-class black students and…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
