That Was My Geology Class
I was on a train in New York City when I received a frantic call from a writer at the Northern Star, the school newspaper at Northern Illinois University. The reporter told me there was a shooting at my school and that he was standing next to a girl covered
The Bourgie Blues
Alana and Craig Wilson live in a predominately white, middle-class subdivision in Virginia’s Fairfax County, just outside of Washington, D.C. Across the Potomac River, Terry and Rodney Jefferson reside in majority-black Prince George’s County, Maryland.The Wilsons and Jeffersons are black and middle-class. Both families, deeply concerned about the world their
She'll Take That
At Sunday’s Grammy Awards ceremony, Alicia Keys graciously thanked Prince for handing her the prize for best female R&B vocal performance for her smash “No One.” But she has so much more to thank him for.T.S. Eliot once wrote that, “bad poets imitate; good poets steal.” And Keys’ latest effort
Blackness: A Quick and Dirty Primer
In the The New York Times last Sunday, Jill Nelson dismissed the idea that black people ever really wondered whether Sen. Barack Obama was “black enough.” My memory of how Obama was being discussed a year ago is different from Nelson’s. Today, however, black people who question Obama’s authenticity are
Immersion Therapy
Not my idea, not really. Credit mostly belongs to a poet friend of mine.We were discussing some independent movie by an unknown black director he had just seen at a special screening at his local art house. It would be cool, said The Poet, to be able to see more
The Democrats' Texas Hold'em
-What is Sen. Barack Obama going to do about his Latino problem? No use pretending he doesn’t have one. The numbers don’t lie. Sen. Hillary Clinton crushed him among Hispanic voters on Super Tuesday, defeating him by 20, 30 and 40-point margins in places like Arizona, New Mexico, California and
