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Going Home To Help Haiti
“I really don’t believe it was ever a decision I had to make but more like, yeah … I’m gonna say it, a calling,” my brother, Hervé, writes to me in an e-mail from Jacmel, Haiti. He traveled there two weeks ago from his home in Los Angeles to assist in what had previously been…
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Does Europe Still Heart Obama?
It was a whirlwind affair. Europe’s love-at-first-sight attraction to Barack Obama grew quickly into a serious courtship in the weeks before and after his election. His inauguration signaled the promise of a healthy relationship: common interests, similar goals, mutual respect and a commitment to make it work. Consider this week the first major post-honeymoon dust-up.…
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Wouldn't Miss It For The World
We communicate daily in languages we didn’t grow up speaking. We have learned to adapt to cultures that have not entirely adopted us. Barack Obama might call us, as he has himself, “citizens of the world.” But for Americans living abroad, it’s our chance at changing the world as American citizens that is calling many…
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The Hitler Comparison
Comparing politicians to Adolf Hitler is a tired, cheap trick that has been used to demonize George W. Bush, John McCain and even Barack Obama. The problem with the comparison is that it makes blanket generalizations of who is good and who is evil, while overlooking the historical conditions that allowed a nation to be…
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American Democracy, A Cautionary Tale
While the greatness of American democracy is celebrated by Obama and McCain, the rest of the free world is squinting and tilting its head at our version of egalitarianism: staggeringly expensive political campaigns, a questionably representative two-party system, a confusing and misleading electoral college and laws (and tricks) that continue to disenfranchise minorities. It also…
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Obama in Berlin
When I moved to Berlin eight years ago—in the wake of a rash of neo-Nazi attacks against foreigners of color—I wondered if people stared at me because they didn’t want me in their country. I suspected men who came on too fast were merely toying with a fetish. I thought the cold, standoffish manner from…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
