culture

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…

Things are pretty calm in India. Its recent election of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh means that the world’s largest democracy will once again be led by a seasoned economist. And it all happened peacefully, fairly and relatively without incident. By contrast, in Pakistan, the army is fighting to recapture territory from the Taliban and shore…

It’s March of 1850 when James McBride’s new novel, “Song Yet Sung,” opens. That’s when Liz Spocott has the dream that makes her decide she’d rather be a 19th century slave than a 21st century black American. “She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black…

The news, this weekend, that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after a prolonged search, has finally selected a new president brought to mind an old philosophical conundrum: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does anyone give a hoot? The sad fact is…

Last year, when I gave birth to my daughter and then experienced a range of complications that rivaled a plot line from the television show “House,” I was shocked that such a thing was possible. Upon my release from the hospital, my doctor came to me and said, “Half a million women die every year…

Last year I came across a New York Times story about increasing levels of infant mortality among African Americans. It stated that deaths of children in the first year of life, on the decline in previous years, were rising steadily. A few months later, another New York Times article discussed the declining rate of infant…

I am part of the generation — the post civil-rights generation, post-black power generation — that turned Malcolm X into a T-shirt and cap. He was our symbol of racial discontent and political angst. Though we did not live through the brutal repression of Jim Crow, we knew for ourselves, in our own way, the…

Except when Shaquille O’Neal is involved, good things happen in threes when it comes to NBA title runs. In the ’90s, the Chicago Bulls won six titles with a combination of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and a stellar rebounding forward (Horace Grant from ’91-’93 and Dennis Rodman from ’96 -’98). In the last five years,…

I have been gaming longer than most gamers have been alive. In the early 1970s, I was one of a handful of electronic technicians at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center who used what was allegedly the most powerful computer complex outside of the military and intelligence communities to play geeky Star Trek strategy games during…