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Michelle Obama: First Lady of the United States
The first first lady to enter my consciousness was Rosalynn. I was 13 at the time. She was 50, the child of a farmer, the wife of a former governor, the mother of three. I could not relate to her, exactly—she was older than my mother and white and from a deeper kind of South…
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When Tom Met Sally
Once in a dry season I wrote an essay about my experiences with interracial dating that was published in the New York Times. To say the essay generated a little heat would be like saying certain Wall Street types took a little off the top. Although the vast majority of the 300-plus e-mails I received (not…
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What's So Funny About Africa?
The New York Times ran a story on its front page last Saturday about the king of Swaziland, Mswati III, who leads a life of ostentatious luxury while the people of his small and proud nation struggle with poverty, malnourishment and HIV. The story of a greedy leader bilking his people is a sadly common…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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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…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
