Search results for: “quotemedia/c”
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Even Beneath the Haze, Blacks Used to Do Better
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a very smart piece on Bill Cosby’s latter-day “Come On, People” crusade in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It will deservedly be a standard reference for years to come. However, Coates makes one well-intentioned mistake: he thinks people who decry the current state of the poor black community are nostalgicists.…
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Thug Life on the Campaign Trail
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has leveled an odd charge against Barack Obama. He accuses the Illinois senator’s campaign of trying to hijack the Democratic presidential nomination by arguing it has a stronger claim on the nomination because Obama has more pledged delegates than Sen. Hillary Clinton and larger percentage of the popular vote. Wilentz argues…
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5 Things You Should Know About Crack
Change is in the air, and I’m not talking about presidential politics. While the rest of the country obsesses over delegate math, black America would do well to pay closer attention to another vote count—how senators and members of Congress are lining up on the most serious effort to date to fix our unfair and…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…