culture

The latest entry in the celebrity-driven, black family, reality TV phenomenon is Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love, which debuted last week, oddly enough, on Oxygen, a channel better-known for Bad Girls Club. For those who don’t follow professional sports the celebrity in this series is Deion Sanders, who was a bona fide superstar in…

It’s not surprising that many African Americans give Earth Day a pass. When you live poorer and die younger in the land of plenty, it can be hard to get excited about protecting the planet at large. The oppression of black people covers centuries of troubled terrain from forced agricultural labor, to contemporary land loss,…

A lot of things recently turned 50. You might recall them. Madonna – yawn. The Dodgers – thank God they haven’t abandoned Los Angeles like another professional team, which shall remain nameless. The Grammy Awards – the crystal ball simply didn’t see rap and hip-hop coming and staying. Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat…

Two years ago the NBA engaged in one of the best postseasons ever. One night around 2 a.m. in New York, I was still in the giddy throes of the seven hours of playoff hoops, I sent an e-mail to a dozen or so hardcore basketball fans that said something to the effect of: “isn’t…

Sweet, Sour & Spicy Blackberry Limeade Yield: 2 Servings Soundtrack: “Very Special” by Duke Ellington With Charles Mingus & Max Roach from Money Jungle.” After a few friends living on the east coast told me that they were nursing their second and third colds of this year, I conjured up this recipe. I don’t know…

Those who know my politics, such as they are for a journalist who’s spent a working life concealing such things, might be surprised at my inner closeness to the old beliefs and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. Let’s establish, first of all, that I am no longer a practicing Catholic. I was at a…

As news programs around the country marked the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. recently, I watched the special reports and documentaries with a mixture of shame and pride, joy and sadness, inspiration and discouragement. I listened to the interviews of civil rights leaders who knew King and the…

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world,…

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.…

I’ve always considered it a blessing to have grown up black during the 1960s when the walls came tumblin’ down. My formative years, politically, were shaped by protests against segregation and the Vietnam War, led by heroic men and women my own age. They made me a radical. In addition, the 60s came with a…