Search results for: “quotemedia/c”
-
Tyler Perry's Conservative Tent Revival
I accept that Tyler Perry is a pop culture phenomenon. His new film, Meet the Browns, took in more than $20 million its opening weekend and his TV sitcom, House of Payne, won three NAACP image awards. But I find myself wondering how thoughtful folks are supposed to respond to the retrograde spirituality and formulaic…
-
History Lived, Lessons Learned
Most of us are dead. But five of us are not. We are among the 20 African American women chosen by a group of educators and black history experts to be featured in a traveling exhibition called “Freedom’s Sisters.” And on a Friday night in mid-March at the Cincinnati Museum Center, the five of us…
-
Give These Jersey Girls a Break
Bit by bit, I’m becoming a fan of the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights women’s basketball team and Don Imus has nothing to do with it. Blame the NCAA. Every year when they pick their field of 64 for the women’s basketball championship, the selection committee figures out a way to slight Rutgers. The Scarlet Knights…
-
Was it Too Little, Too Late?
It was an amazing speech, a brilliant speech. It was brilliant both in substance and in delivery. He told a convincing, moving story about his own racial history. He was able to paint a truly hopeful, but pragmatic, picture of why people should come together across races. He attempted to explain why he would not…
-
Is Obama Wrong About Wright?
Senator Obama is mistaken. The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who is the Obama family’s pastor and the subject of recent fierce attacks in the media, is not, as Obama has stated, that “he has a lot of the…baggage of those times,” (those times being the 1960s). The problem is also not,…
-
No Time For Smoked-Filled Rooms
Several weeks ago we were presented with the surreal specter of two iconic figures from the civil rights movement battling each other in the name of “democracy.” Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, wrote a letter in early February to the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) demanding that the delegates “elected” by…
-
Lies and Consequences
Call it a comedy of editors. Looking back on the initial media blitz surrounding Love and Consequences, the auto-myth-ography by Margaret B. Jones (nee Margaret “Peggy” Seltzer), laughs come first, but anger comes hardest. Take last week’s 2,000-word New York Times profile about the author and her tall tale of gang life in South Central…
-
Could an Obama Win Backfire on Blacks?
Abigail Thernstrom, the conservative commentator on race in the U.S., once called me a member of the “doom and gloom” contingent among black political scholars. So, that probably makes me overqualified to make this assertion, but here goes. An Obama presidency could seriously backfire on African Americans. It is true that should Barack Obama become…
-
He’s Black and We’re Proud
It is supremely ironic that Barack Obama, the candidate who seeks to bury race as an issue in this campaign season, owes his overwhelming support among blacks to the continued power of black nationalism. For a century and a half, black nationalism has provided the main ideological challenge to the liberal, social democratic sensibilities that…
-
Stand Strong, Tavis
One of the really unfortunate aspects of the current battle for the Democratic presidential nomination is the apologetic position many blacks are taking regarding Barack Obama’s candidacy. It goes something like this: “We shouldn’t press him too much to talk about black issues because that might mess it up for the brother.” This color-before-accountability group-think…