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Immersion Therapy
Not my idea, not really. Credit mostly belongs to a poet friend of mine. We were discussing some independent movie by an unknown black director he had just seen at a special screening at his local art house. It would be cool, said The Poet, to be able to see more movies like that, movies…
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Bush's Liberian Lovefest
President George W. Bush is off on a visit to Africa. He’ll be zipping through Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia in less than a week. Some may wonder why, after visiting Africa only once before during his long (interminable) presidency, in 2003, Bush has decided at this late date to return his attention, albeit…
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Postcard From Liberia
On my first night in Monrovia the rain pounds so hard on the tin roof of the house where I am staying, the sound is able to snatch me from a deep and jetlagged sleep. There is no rain like the rain in Liberia and I have heard it before, but this is February, the…
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Match Points
I went on Match dot com not to find someone but to rid myself of silly romantic illusions. It worked exquisitely. Remember last year when that film clip was making the rounds of the Internet, the one about a black man taking his white girlfriend to his ex-wife’s house and then sticking around to deliver…
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Cruel Intentions?
I know a woman who, a few years ago, suffered a miscarriage about halfway through her pregnancy. A week or so after the event, she telephoned me in tears, sobbing so hard it took five full minutes to calm her down. It wasn’t just the miscarriage, she said, but the terrible things people were saying…
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Whiteygate
And so continues the conundrum of being a post-racial black candidate in a still-very-racial world. To speak the truth about anything involving race is to be accused instantly of dragging out that famous racial deck we’ve all been dealt that stands us in such good stead in America. The campaign of Barack Obama has had…
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Misfire
Honestly, I can’t get worked up about it. Maybe because it’s summertime. Maybe because economic analysts are predicting more than 100 U.S. banks could fail this year, and the bank-run scene from It’s a Wonderful Life keeps flashing through my mind. (Maybe I should mosey on down to the local branch.) Or maybe because it’s…
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America's Chitlin' Era
This weekend I finally opened the quarterly statements for my retirement accounts. After a few minutes of weeping and a few more spent calculating how many additional years I would now be forced to labor in the vineyard, I had a thought that cheered me. Sure, the economy is staggering. Sure, we are five years…
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Michelle's Neighborhood
The great Toni Morrison once said in an interview that whenever she bumped up against some incident of racial exclusion or insult as a child, her father would shield his daughter’s tender heart by reminding her, “You don’t live in that neighborhood. That is not your home.” When Michelle Obama takes the stage as the…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
