culture

As Clay Davis, my favorite character on The Wire, would say, “sheeeeeeit!” Yesterday’s election results have given me the blues. I was hoping that Barack Obama would knock Hillary Clinton out of the race and lock up the Democratic nomination. Instead, Clinton’s big wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island have set us up for…

In one of my favorite episodes of “The Boondocks,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. awakens after 32 years in a coma. Confronted with the black community, circa 2006, Dr. King is appalled. BET, Michael Jackson and “Soul Plane” are among the things that push Dr. King to the point of calling us “trifling, shiftless, good-for-nothing…

In his 1995 book Rage of a Privileged Class, Ellis Cose noted that behind the external trapping of success—good educations, comfortable incomes, nice homes—middle-class blacks are angry and disillusioned. In her new book, Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting (Scribner) author Terrie M. Williams warns that over a decade later something’s still…

Iʼm really not a happy-endings kinda guy. It could just be my crabby nature, but I figure it owes to growing up in the early ʽ70s loving American new wave cinema; movies like Dog Day Afternoon and Network gave me my passion for real-life conclusions. And I really, really donʼt like happy endings in sports.…

Mention “soul food” and you will hear scores of health and medical professionals claim that it is the downfall of the health and well-being of African Americans. It is true that African Americans have some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers of any group in this country. But frankly,…

Watching [The Root’s Editor-in-Chief] Henry Louis Gates Jr. delve into the ancestry of African Americans on PBS recently got me thinking about Alex Haley’s Roots, the book that started it all. Both the book and the phenomenally successful mini-series based on it came out during the 1976-77 academic year when I was a Nieman Fellow…

My recent piece on a definition of blackness seems to have created some misunderstandings. Many seem to think that if all people of African descent do not exhibit a cultural trait, then there are no grounds for designating that trait “black.” Upon which I note: ostriches do not fly; bats do. Does this mean that…

The Clintons covered a lot of slimy ground in the run-up to South Carolina. They dismissed the relevance of Barack Obama’s victory, chalking it up to black voters supporting their own. They put racially loaded jabs in blackface, through stooges like BET founder Bob Johnson. And they lured Obama into daily, petty spats that left…

It is supremely ironic that Barack Obama, the candidate who seeks to bury race as an issue in this campaign season, owes his overwhelming support among blacks to the continued power of black nationalism. For a century and a half, black nationalism has provided the main ideological challenge to the liberal, social democratic sensibilities that…

Little Lawrence King was queer. Not just in some identity politics way, but literally. Despite the innocence of his round, brown cheeks and puppy dog eyes, the kid was a threatening oddity at his Ventura County junior high school. Either because he was brave or naïve, or because he just couldn’t help himself, Lawrence reveled…