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Stanley Crouch: On Lady Obama
Through her combination of cunning, empathy and resilience Michelle Obama embodies the blue steel level of revelation that’s central to the blues itself and to the tragic optimism of Americana at its best. Even though she is from Chicago, the urban blues capital, and her husband has the same birthday as Louis Armstrong, it is doubtful…
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Hold That Tiger
If you know the way from the alley to Buckingham Palace and back, having listened to the glistening slime of pimps and hustlers can provide you with a perfectly realistic sense of human nature beyond the supposedly shocking Tiger Woods scandal. In my youth, almost any subject would be taken apart in the near darkness of…
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Bette Davis: The Greatest White Bitch of All
“In my day we didn’t talk much about happiness. If it came, we were grateful for it. But we were brought up in the belief that there were other things more important.” “What things?” “Oh, old fogey fantastic notions such as duty and personal responsibility.” “In This Our Life” was released in 1942 and provided…
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Why Quentin Tarantino Will Not Win an Oscar
It is a cynical Hollywood wisdom that one cannot win at the Academy Awards against any well-made film focused on World War II and the crimes Nazi Germany committed against European Jews who were murdered on an industrial scale. Any reference to the Third Reich is ultimately an allusion to those murders. Given all that,…
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Gates' Cold Shower on the Reparations Debate
In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place. With intellectual honesty as his intent, Henry Louis Gates Jr. set off a bomb in the black wing of “victim studies”…
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Celebrating Two Women Who Were Doers
As most should know, we recently lost Dorothy Height and Evelyn Cunningham. Both women were in their 90s, but neither would ever have accepted the idea that publicity equals the truth of importance or the truth of important effort. Since the world of public relations has become as influential as fact, people who read little do…
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Lena Horne and the Hollywood Shuffle
The wench was both love object and object of ridicule in musical numbers; those musical numbers were the favorites of white women who were thrilled to hear romantic emotion expressed toward their sex. Thus, an archetype was born, on which Tyler Perry continues to make bank through well-loved variations. There it is. By the time…
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A Coup for the Cool One
Those who do not know boxing are always doubtful of a counter-puncher’s skill—until they see him serve a resounding, high-classed, painful whipping. Negative comments about the counter-puncher are often generated if he does not huff and puff like someone’s cartoon of a bad guy in professional wrestling. But after all of the criticism of President…
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Memo to BP: You Can Run, but You Can't Hide
Heavyweight champion Joe Louis could easily have been describing our moment many years ago when he famously warned his opponents, ”You can run, but you can’t hide.” In the context of covered-up child abuse by the Vatican, an environmental disaster of epic proportions created by British Petroleum, and the destructive motion through the room of…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
