Search results for: “quotemedia/f”
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Distract, Distort, Demagogue
f nothing else, the sycophants genuflecting to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign are experts at creating diversions. When things go bad, they call out the troops to fill the airwaves with misdirection. Or they heave Hail Mary passes, hoping to connect with their easy-to-anger supporters. In fact, they’ll do just about anything except admit to the…
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The Pain Beneath the Swagger
“I was never depressed. […] I just want to tell everybody I’m fine. I’m good. It’s a blessing to play the game that I love.” —Vince Young In case you didn’t know already, black boys don’t cry. Tears just don’t go with the brand. African-American males are encouraged to be fearless, cocky and impervious to external…
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Trading O.J.
On the day of his induction into Pro-Football Hall Of Fame in 1985, O.J. Simpson should have said to the crowd in Canton, Ohio: “Thank you guys so much….This is great,” then turned, taken one last look at his old life, draped his yellow blazer across his broad shoulders, hopped on his spaceship and flew…
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Talking Points
Barack Obama’s 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention contained sound-bite-worthy lines that would be replayed long after the ovation subsided. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America,” he said. Despite his greenness—Obama had never before used a teleprompter—the reaction was titanic. Bill Clinton waited with throngs…
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Obama in Berlin
When I moved to Berlin eight years ago—in the wake of a rash of neo-Nazi attacks against foreigners of color—I wondered if people stared at me because they didn’t want me in their country. I suspected men who came on too fast were merely toying with a fetish. I thought the cold, standoffish manner from…
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Barack, Here's How to Get the White People
Is America ready to elect a black president? We’ll find out in November. Barack Obama’s candidacy poses an unprecedented sociological experiment. Everything about us, including how far we’ve come toward the creation of the more perfect union in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin,…
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Clinton Collateral Damage
Something is wrong. Perhaps the trouble lies with me, though I think it lies elsewhere and that I’m not the only one experiencing this creeping sense of dread at a point when I should feel ecstatic. Fighting off the scourge of political cynicism has been a more formidable challenge in the past few months than…
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Return of the 'Real' White People
I’m glad to see that real white people are back, the kind that justify the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s paranoia. For a while I assumed those kinds of white people had disappeared into the multiculti, Starbuck-sipping, bilingual, globe-trotting crowd that I routinely run across in our nation’s capital—the kind you read about on Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com—the kind I…
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The Man Behind the Music
Music reflects a people’s political, social and cultural life, so it is no surprise that “We Shall Overcome” conveys the optimism and determination of the Civil Rights era, and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin On?” conveys the disillusionment of the post-Civil Rights era. Similarly, it is no surprise that since Barack Obama has opened a new…
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The Obama Hour
This article and poem was written in the come-up to the 2008 presidential election. The poem, titled “The Obama Hour” was written by Thomas Sayers-Ellis and is reprinted below. Pundits say Obama has a “problem” with white voters. These “hard-working” white folks, in contrast to the lazy, resource-draining, criminally prone black folk, just won’t vote…