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Obama: Gifted, Black and Boxed In
In the introduction to The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, Randall Kennedy, the noted professor of law at Harvard and racial commentator, makes the following assessment of Barack Obama’s unprecedented predicament: “He is a politician seeking to lead and govern a massive, complex, dysfunctional democracy that has long suppressed the racial…
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Juan Williams Makes It Too Simple
Juan Williams (no relation), who, you will recall, was fired from NPR in October after making remarks about “getting nervous” when he gets on the plane and sees people “who are in Muslim garb,” reignited the media flare-up over racial profiling while guest-hosting The O’Reilly Factor last week. Responding to his interlocutor, Dr. Caroline Helmand…
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Passing for Black?
It created a minor media frenzy last spring when President Barack Obama checked the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box on his census form and, as an item on The Root put it, “set the post-racial dream back 400 years.” Elizabeth Chang, a mother of (Asian-Caucasian) biracial daughters and an editor at the Washington Post,…
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The Inherent Conservatism of Hip-Hop
Is it conservative to criticize hip-hop? Recently I wrote an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal in which I expressed a feeling of deep disappointment and frustration that Barack Obama would show appreciation — without qualification — for rappers such as Lil Wayne and Jay-Z. I argued that the president can and should listen to…
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Remembering Pappy
During the summer before I went to high school, my father, Pappy — by this time an older man with bad knees, a thick salt-and-pepper beard, and a powerful-looking bald head — took off from work, packed up our sedan and drove me down Interstate 95 to Fredericksburg, Md., same as he did every year.…
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Is Drake the Bill Clinton of Rap?
Bill Clinton was famous for lamenting the mistiming of his presidency. If only he’d been given a war or some great cause, he thought, he could have risen to the occasion and taken his place among the greats. But through no fault of his own, fate had other plans: instead of steering his country out…
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What Obama and Drake Have to Do With Being Black
I’m the son of a black father and a white mother. As a child coming up in the 1980s and ’90s, I immersed myself in hip-hop style and culture, excelled at sports, rocked aerodynamic hairstyles, and spoke in the same florid body language that the older brothers at the local black barbershop were fluent in.…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
