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The Peril of Racial Memories
It is very dangerous for an administration to follow too closely to the advice, or marching orders, of ideologues on the right or the left. There is also great danger in responding too quickly to what might be no more than willful lying passed off as fact on a network like Fox News, which takes…
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George Steinbrenner: The Man-Child Who Would Be King
When New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died this week at 80, there was almost an obligatory succession of respectful and apparently affectionate things said about him. With melodramatic sentimentality, the eulogizers waxed on about how old George was a hard man who knew how to get things done. A lackey who introduced the baseball…
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Sending the Devil Home
Pray the Devil Back to Hell is such an exceptional documentary, transcending mere fact telling to provide a shocking occasion of human affirmation. In a shorthand of crisp but telling images and interviews, the 2008 film, recently released on DVD, tells us of the remarkable victory had by a Liberian peace movement. The movement was…
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A Farewell to Hank Jones
The dimension and feeling of jazz were perfectly realized during a recent Saturday-afternoon memorial held in Harlem for pianist Hank Jones, who had died at 91. Television cameras and radio microphones were not there to create the glaring atmosphere surrounding pop music these days, whether performed by instrumentalists or singers or those others incapable of entry into…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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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,…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
