culture

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…

Am I my brother’s keeper? Clemson tailback Ray Ray McElrathbey lives his life by answering yes to that biblical question every day. So, two years ago with his mother battling a drug addiction and his absentee father crippled by an equally self-sabotaging gambling affliction, the question of what to do with his then 11-year-old brother…

Perhaps one of the truest and most tragic lines in American film is spoken by the character Yellow Mary in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust(1991) when she sadly declares that “the rape of the colored woman is as common as fish in the sea.” As a rape survivor, I speak on behalf of the…

The New York Times recently reported on the increasing popularity of “Slum tourism.” For North-American and European travelers who want more from their vacations than beaches and monuments, group tours of Brazilian favelas or Indian shanty towns offer access to some of the poorest pockets of the developing world. The article explored some of the…

I was listening to Erykah Badu’s new CD, New AmErykah and I had one consistent thought, “This is genius.” Listening to New AmErykah, I was reminded of the powerful book, Black Genius edited by Walter Mosley, Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor and Regina Austin. Published in 2000, on the brink of a new century, the book…

I witnessed something truly astonishing on Monday night: a public discussion of black women’s experiences of sexual violence at the hands of black men. It was an intergenerational group of black men and women, gay and straight, survivors and perpetrators, all grappling with the legacy of rape and race. The experience was unusual because black…

As we head down the final stretch of the NBA season, a time honored ritual will begin, calls to fix the playoff system. Not fix as in Tim Donaghy the crooked referee, but correct so that what is likely to happen this year won’t happen again. Everyone who follows the sport closely—and at this point…