Politics

The first time I met Dorothy Height, who was laid to rest this week, I was 29, a member of the Political Congress of Black Women, and struggling to find my place in the civil rights movement as a black lesbian. It seemed, back then, that I had an awful choice to make: I could…

President Obama joined a capacity crowd of the rich, the famous, and the beneficiaries of Dorothy Height’s struggle for equality in her final sendoff today. The President delivered a moving eulogy at Washington’s National Cathedral for Height, who died last week at the age of 98. From the president’s eulogy: “Look at her body of…

If Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Fla., wins the Senate race in Florida, where the two conservative candidates have dominated the headlines, it won’t just be a historic win for a black politician. He would offer a glimpse of success for a group struggling for victories: the children of prominent black political figures. At the same time…

I’m the son of a black father and a white mother. As a child coming up in the 1980s and ’90s, I immersed myself in hip-hop style and culture, excelled at sports, rocked aerodynamic hairstyles, and spoke in the same florid body language that the older brothers at the local black barbershop were fluent in.…

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama aroused some controversy by checking “African American” on his U.S. Census form. He’s black, some say. No, he’s half-white, declare others. If blackness is more of a social construct than a biological one, what are its social definitions? Its dating and marriage choices? An identification fostered on Hawaiian basketball…

Holding that Line: Goldman executives tight-lippedhttp://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/27/1600918/under-heated-questioning-goldman.html What did you expect? We don’t even know why they’re having hearings. Why ask liars, thieves and scoundrels who made billions while tanking the U.S. economy to tell the truth? Sure, the Goldman execs are the beacons of truth, which is how we got into this dire economic situation…

In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place. With intellectual honesty as his intent, Henry Louis Gates Jr. set off a bomb in the black wing of “victim studies”…

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s op-ed in the New York Times, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” (April 22, 2010), is a provocative piece whose core argument is the following: Because African elites were involved in the transatlantic slave trade as commercial partners with Europeans, blame is necessarily and equally assigned to them as well, spreading guilt…

President Obama will deliver the eulogy at the funeral of Dorothy Height, the civil rights leader who died last week at the age of 98. Height, who was president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, was one of the last surviving leaders of the generation that battled for the fundamental rights of African…