Politics

Fade back to 1983. Reaganomics has black America in a stranglehold, unemployment is running rampant, and my sisters and I have snuck into the basement after lights out to watch Eddie Murphy, clad in a skintight red leather outfit, tell dirty jokes. Eddie says he saw Jesse Jackson working out at the gym now that…

We were supposed to see a fur coat in this election. It was supposed to come out at an inopportune moment, the way Frank Lucas’ (Denzel Washington) garish chinchilla did at the Ali-Frazier fight in American Gangster. It tipped everyone off that the customarily low-profile and buttoned-down Lucas was the guy they thought he was…

The first first lady to enter my consciousness was Rosalynn. I was 13 at the time. She was 50, the child of a farmer, the wife of a former governor, the mother of three. I could not relate to her, exactly—she was older than my mother and white and from a deeper kind of South…

Barack Obama is far more than the first black president; he is the first Internet president. Certainly, integrating the White House is the more historic accomplishment, but Obama’s remarkable innovations in campaigning may have a longer-term impact. From this moment forward, ambitious candidates around the world will be trying to copy the successful, Web-based code…

After months of watching Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown, David Gergen and Jeffrey Toobin on CNN, after laughing and crying through many a Facebook chat with some of the smartest (and most fabulous) black and multiracial women in the world, after pouring my heart, mind and soul into blog posts on The Root, the Huffington Post…

READ MORE VOTER STORIES Myles and Nina Bell West Chester, Ohio Miles: Barack Obama is a beast. I like what he stands for. He wants to help people. The gas prices are high; he’s trying to lower them. He’s going to make sure that more people get insurance and that everybody will be safe and…

Dear Brother Obama,You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade…

It isn’t often that you get to choose where to watch history in the making, but Election Night was that rare event that you could pick your perch. I chose Harlem as my perch. I don’t live there, but I work there once a week, tending to the cheese program at a wine bar—yes, a…

Black people aren’t the only ones worried about embarrassing themselves now that Obama is president-elect. Here are a few pointers for white people. 1. Don’t personally congratulate all your black friends. Black people are not a sports team, and Obama did not win the Super Bowl. 2. Don’t declare that you “never thought you’d see…