culture
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A Dried-up, Shriveled Little 'Raisin'
I still remember the sore elbows I got snuggled up to our fuzzy 19-inch to watch three nights of Alex Haley’s “Queen.” That was 15 years ago. On Monday, Feb. 25, a new generation of 12-year-olds will suffer their boney joints watching ABC’s “world premiere movie event” — Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.”…
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Maybe They Cheated. So What?
Here’s what I’m rooting for after the Congressional hearings into whether Roger Clemens or Brian McNamee lied to the Mitchell Committee. I hope Congress figures out a better way to spend its time and my tax dollars. I don’t need Sen. Arlen Specter convening a committee into why New England Patriots coach illegally taped opponent’s…
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That Was My Geology Class
I was on a train in New York City when I received a frantic call from a writer at the Northern Star, the school newspaper at Northern Illinois University. The reporter told me there was a shooting at my school and that he was standing next to a girl covered in blood. My worst fear…
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Is the NBA Losing Its Street Cred?
This weekend, when the NBA All Stars play in New Orleans, expect lots of slam dunks and other flamboyant plays that have become typical of black basketball. It’s not an ugly stereotype; it’s history. Pre-NBA, most black basketball teams played in ballrooms and were part of an evening of entertainment that often included a big…
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She'll Take That
At Sunday’s Grammy Awards ceremony, Alicia Keys graciously thanked Prince for handing her the prize for best female R&B vocal performance for her smash “No One.” But she has so much more to thank him for. T.S. Eliot once wrote that, “bad poets imitate; good poets steal.” And Keys’ latest effort “As I Am” leaves…
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The Bourgie Blues
Alana and Craig Wilson live in a predominately white, middle-class subdivision in Virginia’s Fairfax County, just outside of Washington, D.C. Across the Potomac River, Terry and Rodney Jefferson reside in majority-black Prince George’s County, Maryland. The Wilsons and Jeffersons are black and middle-class. Both families, deeply concerned about the world their children will inherit, do…
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Immersion Therapy
Not my idea, not really. Credit mostly belongs to a poet friend of mine. We were discussing some independent movie by an unknown black director he had just seen at a special screening at his local art house. It would be cool, said The Poet, to be able to see more movies like that, movies…
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Blackness: A Quick and Dirty Primer
In the The New York Times last Sunday, Jill Nelson dismissed the idea that black people ever really wondered whether Sen. Barack Obama was “black enough.” My memory of how Obama was being discussed a year ago is different from Nelson’s. Today, however, black people who question Obama’s authenticity are indeed a fringe. So what’s…
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The Blackest Eye
As she observes the racial dynamics at play in the Democratic presidential contest, Toni Morrison must be somewhere biting her nails. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer never struck me as the nervous type, but if ever there was a case for the jitters, it is now. In recent months, Morrison has had to stand back and…
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Strip Mall Medicine
Tucked away at the edge of a ramshackle strip mall on the black side of town in Montgomery, Ala., there’s an AIDS clinic. When I was last there, in 2005, the mall featured just a couple of weather-beaten shops—a dollar store, a beauty parlor—and this nondescript clinic, quietly declaring its presence without using the word…