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How the West Was Lost
Five years ago I wrote to a friend about Kanye West’s well-reviewed but (in my opinion) emperor-has-no-clothes, comically awful album Yeezus: “I’m not sure what Kanye even does musically anymore except be Kanye, similar to Donald Trump’s name being used by foreign firms being used to market products because it’s recognizable,” I noted. Those shocked…
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Whiteness in America Is a Virus Whose Sole Purpose Is Preserving Itself
The only photograph I have with James Alan McPherson is from the beginning of the Obama era; it turned out to be far more symbolic than I could have imagined. In the picture, Jim’s students flank him, a fairly mixed group of mostly smiling faces: three white women, two black men, a black woman, a…
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8 Years a President: Thoughts on 2 Terms of a Black President and Black First Family
It’s a tall task to assess the entirety of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, to cull an ultimate judgment from all the success and missteps of his administration, and then measure that against the unprecedented obstructions it faced. One can point to the decline in deficit and the growth of gross domestic product,…
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Fear of a Nonwhite Planet
What are black people to do when the dog-whistling becomes a siren song? As his campaign shows signs of sinking beneath the tide of sexual assault accusations, his own vile words, inconsistent and nonexistent political and social policies, and an inability to follow the suggestions of his advisers or to stay on script during public…
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What Conservatives Really Mean When They Talk About Rap
What you say about somebody else reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me. —James Baldwin Donald Trump supporters have continually found new, improbable ways to rationalize the…
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White America Must Heal Itself: 2016 Is 1965 and 1984
Last weekend, during a writing retreat, I ended up in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Iowa entered the Union as a free state and was a hub for the Underground Railroad, but I wasn’t surprised to see a handful of Confederate flags flying from homes as I drove through towns called Solon and North Liberty. Ours has…
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Confounding Fathers: Paternalism and the Sociopathic Nature of Racial Discourse in America
Not even 24 hours after Hollywood has-been Michael Rapaport tweeted to me the last of his puerile, racist memes, I looked up at a television in my gym and saw him on ESPN, contributing some inane wind about the NFL to keep the 24-hour sports-entertainment mill spinning. Paul Finebaum—who two weeks ago apologized after his…
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King of Pain: 20 Years Later, Tupac Shakur’s Problematic Genius Still Haunts Us
The aphorism goes, “Stars are born, not made.” I understood this twice in childhood: the first time I saw Magic Johnson on television, and the moment in Digital Underground’s “Same Song” video when a resplendent Tupac Shakur burst into the public consciousness on a chariot, wearing a dashiki and kufi, and holding a scepter that…
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What Would Nat Turner Do?
When I was 9 years old, my closest friend was a swaggering, wayward, foul-mouthed Puerto Rican who counterbalanced those attributes by also being smart, precocious and charming. He was the coolest kid in my building, and it flattered my fragile ego that he chose me, a sports-obsessed bookworm, to be his sidekick. For a few…
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When Black Lives Don't Matter to Black Athletes
There is a specific moment in my sportswriting career that haunts me with the slow-burning intensity of a friend’s betrayal: I was interviewing a black professional athlete for a profile over which he and his handlers had fairly tight control. At some point during what had been a casual, fluffy and pedestrian back-and-forth, I asked…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
